Ceillac, France – January 2nd, 2023 – Last June, we had 3 participants in the Race to Alaska (https://www.r2ak.com) test our Pilot Units. One of them ended up capsizing in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in dire conditions and lose our prototype but the other 2 reached Ketchika, AK successfully. Congratulations to them!
We have gathered a ton of very positive feedback regarding the user experience, screen readability and battery life but obviously, these testing conditions revealed a number of flaws that we had to work hard to resolve:
- We are resolving the waterproofing issues by changing the screen glueing technique, reviewing the USB port and getting tighter tolerances offered by injection molded enclosures (the molds will be manufactured around february 2023)
- We will be enhancing the User Experience significantly in our final version. One way of achieving that will be by adding a “center” button in our directional keypad. Most of the functions will be accessible with a single key press (no key combination)
- We are improving the performance significantly as well (adding more storage to store the charts uncompressed, improvement of our deciphering algorithm as well as development of charts loading optimization such as lazy loading and partial loading)
- The magnetic charging port ended up showing corrosion issues. We initially thought of using wireless charging and wireless (wi-fi) for loading the charts but these development would have deteriorated the performance and efficiency of the charging system. Battery efficiency is critical on our small boats so we did not want to make any compromise there. We have decided to go back to a standard USB-C charging port. The port will be waterproof (IP68) and protected by an additional rubber door.
We think these improvements will help make MAPTATTOO a much better product and we can’t wait to show you these in our final production version.
Our plan is to launch a crowdsourcing campaign this Spring (2023) and start shipping soon after.
Stay tuned, thank you for your support and we wish you a ton of exciting adventures and explorations in 2023…
– Erwan Kerebel