Renze Nicolai's Tanmatsu Is a Powerful, Radio-Packed Espressif ESP32-P4 Pocket Terminal

Electrical engineer and self-described hacker Renze Nicolai is preparing to launch an all-in-one palmtop-style gadget designed for everything from penetration testing to LoRa-enabled wireless communication: the Tanmatsu, powered by Espressif's ESP32-P4 chip.

"Tanmatsu is the dream terminal device for hackers, makers, and tech enthusiasts," Nicolai claims. "Based around the powerful [Espressif] ESP32-P4 microcontroller, this device provides an accessible way to make, hack, and tinker on the go. Tanmatsu lets you program on the go and communicate over long distances using LoRa whilst also providing advanced connectivity and extendability options for hardware hacking and development."

The heart of the Tanmatsu is, as Nicolai says, Espressif's ESP32-P4 — a powerful entry in the ESP32 microcontroller family, which packs two 32-bit RISC-V cores running at up to 400MHz and, in the version used in the Tanmatsu, 32MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) on top of the microcontroller's 768kB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM). The machine also includes an Espressif ESP32-C6 single-core 160MHz RISC-V coprocessor, which handles Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Thread- and Zigbee-compatible IEEE 802.15.4 connectivity — with either an Ai-Thinker Ra-01S or Ra-01SH adding LoRa connectivity on the 433MHz or 868MHz bands respectively.

These parts, plus 16MB of on-board flash, are housed in a 3D-printed casing that places an 800×480 MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) color display panel above a compact but functional metal-dome physical keyboard. There's a lithium-polymer battery of unspecified capacity, chargeable via USB Type-C, and expansion capabilities including Qwiic/STEMMA QT compatible I2C and I3C headers, a microSD Card slot, Simple Add-On (SAO) and PMOD headers, and a rear-facing expansion port designed for optional "personality modules."

The device itself is designed as a more powerful, though admittedly bulkier, alternative to the popular Flipper Zero: a pocket-friendly tool aimed at tinkerers and hackers alike. A stock firmware provides a basic "operating system" under which custom applications can run — with Nicolai promising a "marketplace" for developers to share their creations for direct installation on-device. The software will, the maker claims, be released under the permissive MIT license, with the hardware design files to be published as a KiCad project under the permissive variant of the CERN Open Hardware License 2.

More information on the device, the price for which has yet to be announced, is available on the Nicolai Electronics website; interested parties can sign up to be notified when the Tanmatsu is available to order and its design files and source code are publicly released.