Tangara is a portable music player. It outputs high-quality sound through a 3.5-mm headphone jack, lasts a full day on a charge, and includes a processor that’s powerful enough to support any audio format you can throw at it. It’s also 100% open hardware running open-source software, which makes it easy to customize, repair, and upgrade. Tangara plays what you want to hear, however you want to hear it.

Listen to music, audio books, and podcasts on a purpose-built device with a tried-and-true form factor, a familiar user interface, and no interest in your data. Or tear it apart and put it back together again. By tweaking our current firmware, you can experiment with alternative user-interface patterns, new types of content, tracker-based music production, alarm-clock applications, and much more. Or you can design a new faceplate with a different kind of display panel, more physical buttons, speakers, jacks, or…a cherry-wood enclosure? Whatever turns your clickwheel.

Tangara is great DIY platform for non-audio applications, as well. For example, the ESP32 module at its core is popular among those who enjoy exploring and learning about (other people’s) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections. Unlike most such platforms, however, it also gives you a full-color display, a battery, and a one-finger touch interface to work with.

Features & Specifications

• ESP32-based, with a WM8523 DAC and an INA1620 amplifier
• 3.5-mm audio output with support for 200 mW at 32 ohms
• Current support for 16-bit audio at 44.1 or 48 kHz (DAC maxes out at 24 bits and 192-kHz )
• Bluetooth audio support (SBC codec only)
• Firmware supports MP3, FLAC, Opus, and Vorbis codecs
• USB Type-C charging and firmware updates. Data transfer (via SAMD21 + tinyusb) in development
• 2200-mAh battery with a standard, 3-pin JST connector
• 4-mA standby current and ~120 mA active current, depending on the headphones and the volume
• 1.8-inch, 160x128 full-color TFT display
• Two hardware buttons and a flexible, capacitive 'clickwheel'
• An ERM haptic motor
• Uses a standard, SDXC card for storage. Available up to 2 TB
• Firmware based on ESP-IDF, written in C++17
• A pretty cool retro transparent enclosure

Open Source

Our software, firmware, and hardware design files are available on sourcehut.

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