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Tangent Heavy Industries

@tangentheavy.com

A one-person workshop that goes off on tangents: electronics, machining, homelab gear, and whatever's next. Hey, check this out. ▶️ youtube.com/@TangentHeavyIndustries 📝 Blog: tangentheavy.com/blog 🔧 Boards & badges: untitledelec.com

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Tangent Heavy Industries @tangentheavy.com · 17/09/2026

Found it by running the board past Claude as an extra layer of rules check. Game changer. Everyone's focused on LLMs designing boards. But why would I hand off the fun part?! The real value is another set of eyes on the stuff that's easy to get wrong and expensive to find later.

Screenshot of a Claude Code session. I asked it to check the J1 pinout against SFF-8643. It replied that the footprint geometry is correct pitch, zigzag, row spacing and mounting holes all match TE's drawing but the wiring follows the controller end of the cable, while this board is the backplane, so no drive would link and SGPIO wouldn't work.

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Tangent Heavy Industries @tangentheavy.com · 17/09/2026

IT LIVES! A 4-drive SAS backplane I designed so I wouldn't have to pay NAS prices. My first differential board, and it was dead all year. Bug: I designed it to the controller-side spec, not the backplane spec. Fix: plug the cable in backwards, SATA ends into the motherboard. 6 Gbps, no errors!

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