Build log

REV

W38

DATE

Sep 14–20, 2026

CHANGES

12 notes · 5 days

Fri Sep 18

Gave the build log a proper layout. Each week is now a row from a drawing’s revision table, each day gets one date you can link straight to, and a little orange gear splits up days with more than one entry. Tried a solid orange stripe and a square-root tick along the way and binned both.

Made the build log update as things happen instead of in a weekly batch. When a piece of work wraps up, it gets a short entry here the same day, so anyone curious can check what’s on the bench right now. Friday’s roundup just points back at it.

Thu Sep 17

Renamed the portable bench power supply I have been designing. It was called PocketPD, and a small US outfit already sells a product under that exact name, in the same category, shipping right now. Anyone who found mine would have assumed it was a knock-off of theirs, so the name had to go before any of it is public. My first instinct for a replacement turned out to be another product from the same company, which is a good argument for checking rather than trusting a gut feel. Worked through a long list against what is already on the market and ruled out six more: one too close to another bench supply on sale, one a live project elsewhere, one sharing a prefix with a well known USB power brand, one belonging to a bicycle company. Settled on FieldPD, as in fieldwork, the supply that leaves the bench. PD keeps its double meaning, the standard the charger speaks on the way in and the power it hands out the other side. The rename reaches into the circuit board files themselves, not just the documents, so I re-ran the electrical and manufacturing checks afterwards and confirmed the board is byte for byte the same design it was before.

Turned the Tangent Heavy Industries website into a proper blog, built with a small off-the-shelf blog tool instead of anything homemade. Posts can have code, photos that are shrunk automatically for the web, tags and a feed. Comments come from Bluesky: each post links to a Bluesky post, and the replies there show up under the article. Visitors don’t load anything from Bluesky unless they press a button for the newest replies. It is built and tested, but not live yet.

Put the Tangent Heavy Industries blog live and tied everything together: the website, blog, YouTube channel and Bluesky account now all link to each other, and the Bluesky account uses the website’s address as its name. Also got the longer tangentheavyindustries.com address working, so it now forwards to the main site.

Wed Sep 16

Set up a Bluesky account for Tangent Heavy Industries, now under the channel’s own web address as its username (@tangentheavy.com), to go with the YouTube channel: name, bio, a wide version of the drawing-sheet banner, and follows for a handful of hardware and maker accounts (Hackaday, Adafruit, KiCad, OSH Park and others) picked for being active and on-topic. Also drafted a first introduction post and a plan for using the account to help the channel grow.

Gave each drive bay on the NAS backplane a second light: a red fault/locate LED next to the existing activity light. The drive controller card already sends a ‘this drive has failed’ and a ‘find this drive’ signal for every bay, and the board’s little microcontroller was quietly ignoring both; four of its spare pins now drive the new lights, while leaving the pins that would suit a temperature sensor or fan control free for later.

Tue Sep 15

Decided the Turnip lathe’s cast bed will be a slant bed, the way production CNC lathes are built, rather than a flat one. Since the bed is poured, a forty-five degree face costs one angled board in the mold, and it means chips fall into a tray instead of onto the rails. Also confirmed a small bare lathe spindle from a US supplier as the first-version spindle and put it in the cart.

Worked out how the NAS drive backplane should be powered and started, and shopped for cheaper parts. Four hard drives all starting their motors at once pull about eight amps, which is more than the small power plug on the board is rated for, so it will switch to the old-style chunky 4-pin PC power plug, and the drives will be allowed to start one at a time instead of all together. Also went looking for a cheaper version of the expensive nine-dollar drive-cable socket: the only true equivalent is a surface-mount part at about a quarter of the price, harder to solder by hand, while the look-alikes turned out to be the older, incompatible cable standard.

The homemade NAS drive backplane passed its first real hardware test. A three-terabyte drive plugged into the board came up at the full six-gigabit speed and read eight and a half gigabytes at a hundred and sixty megabytes a second with not a single error, which is as fast as that drive goes. That also proves the workaround for the board’s known wiring mistake actually works in practice rather than just on paper: a particular kind of adapter cable, plugged in backwards, cancels the error out. Most of the evening went to a false trail, though. The test PC turns out not to notice drives being plugged in while it is running, and worse, the command meant to make it look again reports ‘nothing there’ rather than admitting it did not really check. So a perfectly good board looked dead twice, and at one point I became convinced the PC’s drive sockets had been switched off in its setup screen, which was wrong. The fix was to stop trusting anything but a full restart. Only two of the four drive sockets are soldered onto the board so far, so that is the limit of what can be tested, but the result is good enough to justify ordering the corrected version of the board.

Mon Sep 14

Checked the NAS backplane’s main cable connector against the official industry pinout, and it found a board-killer. The connector is wired the way the controller card’s end of the cable is wired, not the drive-backplane end. The standard cables cross the wires over, so as drawn every drive’s send and receive lines would meet the controller’s send and receive lines head-on and no drive would ever show up, and the little activity-light signals land on the wrong pins too. The part’s physical footprint itself turned out to be exactly right, so the fix is rewiring which pin goes where, not redesigning the part.

Turned out there’s a proper CNC bed mill and a Bridgeport I can use after hours at work, which reshapes the Turnip lathe plan. The headstock can now be a solid steel block with its bearing seats bored properly on a real machine, instead of a bought spare part or a bolted-together box. The slide plates and the bed’s steel top plate become evening jobs on that mill too. The only new limit is machine time, so everything gets designed for as few setups as possible.