Hi! I'm Tim Huizinga
Ever since I was young I have always been interested in technology, whether it was taking apart (broken) electronics or playing around on my parents computer. In high school I discovered that I also really liked physics, so that is what I ended up studying, but programming always remained one of my hobbies. A couple of years ago I picked up the programming language Rust and all my personal projects since have been build with it!
I also discovered I enjoyed working with hardware during my minor in Electronics for Robotics and have since worked on a variety of hardware related projects at home as well. One example would be adding bluetooth audio to my car, which included hacking into the CAN bus to integrate with the normally CD only steering wheel controls.
I'm also a big Linux fan and have run it as my main operating system for well over a decade at this point, I even game in a virtual machine so I technically never have to leave Linux! This has since expanded to running my own Linux server at home and more recently tinkering with a bare metal Kubernetes cluster at home.
Projects
Home Automation
I have slowly been converting my house into my very own smart home! It all started with a couple of Philips Hue light bulbs. The Hue app allows for some level of automation but it wasn't quite doing what I wanted. So initially I wrote a very simple program in Go to add my own automations. As I added more smart devices to my house, the program grew massively in scope with things quickly getting hacked in just to make it work. Eventually I decided to rewrite the whole thing in Rust! This was my first real Rust after picking up the language during Advent of Code and was (and still is) a great learning experience.
Siranga (Greek for Tunnel)
Sometimes you want to use your fancy new work-in-progress with someone remote, but how would you do this easily and securely? That is where Siranga comes in, with this tool you can quickly create a new subdomain that connects to a local port on your machine, and all you need: SSH! When connecting to Siranga over SSH it makes uses of the tunneling capabilities of SSH to forward one of your local ports to Siranga. At the same time Siranga acts as a webserver and when a connection comes in for a given subdomain it will handle creating the connection through the SSH tunnel.
The authorized SSH keys for each user are retrieved through LDAP and the subdomains are (optionally) protected using ForwardAuth. In my Kubernetes cluster LDAP is provided by LLDAP and ForwardAuth is provided by my single sign-on provider Authelia.
Z80 Computer
The first big hardware project that I worked on was building a computer, from the ground up, around the Z80 microprocessor. I had to learn a wide range of skills for this project, including things like learning how to design PCBs, programming in assembly, working with FPGAs, and learning to operate an oscilloscope.
Car Stereo
My Peugeot 207 only has bluetooth for calling, so I decided it would be fun to build my own bluetooth receiver using the ESP32 microcontroller. The original goal was to just build an audio receiver and hook it up to the aux port in my glovebox. However since then I have also connected the ESP32 to the CAN bus of my car, allowing me to use the controls on my steering wheel to control the music.
Pico P1
This is my most recent project, as I had recently decided to pick up a Raspberry Pi Pico W just to play around with. I decided to build a device to read out my DSMR5 based smart meter using it's P1 port and publish the information using MQTT. The main intention of this project is to learn about Rust for embedded devices, which is still a very new ecosystem. So far it has been quite a nice experience!