What is it?

Tangarine is a faceplate for the Tangara music player which replaces its touchwheel with a set of buttons.

This kit includes one fully assembled faceplate board and (optionally) a set of 3D printed buttons, replacing the faceplate board and touchwheel cover as shown in the Tangara assembly instructions (including the display), but reusing everything else. It does not include the rest of the Tangara.

Why did you make it?

Tangara's touchwheel is objectively very cool, but it wasn't for me. I very much prefer tactile buttons to touch controls. But there's explicit support for hacking on its hardware, so I took advantage of that and made the exact thing I wanted: a faceplate with an unreasonable number of buttons.

What makes it special?

I'm not the first one to make a button faceplate for Tangara (I think this person was), but I was the first to make one that doesn't require replacing the stock case, which I actually quite like.

I've also been working with the Tangara developers to add support for custom input drivers that you can just drop on your SD card, which I think is a very cool feature. Until that's merged, you'll need to build this branch of the firmware to use Tangarine. (Update, December 2025: it's been merged and should be in the next release!)