iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tangent Heavy Industries @tangentheavy.com · 02/10/2026

Friday high five 🖐 Here's my fav: Put out the channel's first Short, a teleprompter built from a $5 picture frame. Also: Simulated the knob board and caught the motor resetting its own chip. Full squirrel brain log: tangentheavy.com/log What did you finish this week? Drop it below.

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Tangent Heavy Industries @tangentheavy.com · 29/09/2026

Real teleprompter beamsplitters cost real money. Picture frame glass costs $4.98. Built the rest from 5mm laser-cut ply. Worth it? 👇 youtu.be/zsqQivLmcL4 #DIY #lasercutting

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I built a teleprompter out of a $5 picture frame #Shorts

Tangent Heavy Industries

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Tangent Heavy Industries @tangentheavy.com · 25/09/2026

Friday high five 🖐 Here's my fav: Reworked my schematic bench book so it opens as tabs instead of one endless page. Also: Went through the knob board assigning part numbers and footprints. Full squirrel brain log: tangentheavy.com/log What shipped in your workshop this week?

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Tangent Heavy Industries @tangentheavy.com · 24/09/2026

The channel has an intro now. 🔧 It has a feel I really like. It's very exciting to finally see a video on the channel. Every frame and every sound comes out of one Python script, and each episode gets its own drawing number. youtu.be/RiATFxm0MCk

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Tangent Heavy Industries | Channel Intro

The Tangent Heavy Industries intro: a gear on a badly tuned PID loop, and a robot arm that slams the T home.

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Tangent Heavy Industries @tangentheavy.com · 18/09/2026

Friday high five 🖐 Here's my fav: Checked the NAS backplane's main cable connector against the official industry pinout. Also: Decided to build a CNC lathe. I'm calling it Turnip. Full squirrel brain log: tangentheavy.com/log Your turn. What did you work on?

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

It caught that my mini-SAS connector used SFF-9402 Table 8-1 (controller side) instead of Table 8-2 (backplane side), so every drive's transmit and receive landed on the wrong halves of the cable's built-in crossover. Hence: works only when plugged in backwards.

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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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Tangent Heavy Industries @tangentheavy.com · 16/09/2026

Hey, check this out. 👋 I'm William. I build things that go off on tangents: circuit boards and badges, CNC and lathe work, and a homelab that got a little out of hand and and and... Tangent Heavy Industries is where I finish them and film them. First video soon. What should I build?

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