Daniel Wiegert - About me

Daniel Wiegert – About me

I'm Daniel "Damme" Wiegert, a shift electrician (skiftelektriker) at Derome Timber AB, based in Skällinge, Halland, Sweden. My work and hobbies sit where electrical engineering, automation, embedded systems, and software meet, balanced by a strong pull toward the outdoors.

Background

I work hands-on in industrial production: safety PLCs (Beckhoff TwinSAFE, Pluto), frequency converters, PLC programming, and the networks that tie it all together. On the IT/OT side I configure VLANs, multicast, fiber, and industrial switches from the CLI.

Alongside the electrical work I write software. I program in C, C++, C#, Python, Go, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, and Assembly, and build on ARM, ESP32, NXP, and PIC platforms with FreeRTOS. I'm comfortable working at the register level: SWD bit-banging, ADIv5 debugging, and writing drivers from scratch.

Reverse engineering and firmware

I like to understand hardware by taking it apart, and taking it over when that's useful. When a device has a microcontroller and a debug port, I want to know what it does and whether I can make it do something better.

That means reverse-engineering boards: tracing circuits, identifying chips, finding test points, and working out undocumented protocols with a logic analyzer. I get into locked or unknown MCUs over SWD and JTAG, sometimes by bit-banging the debug protocol myself when standard tools won't cooperate. Once I understand the hardware, I often throw out the original firmware and write my own from scratch: clocks, peripherals, drivers, and an RTOS where it makes sense, all built on the existing board.

The goal is usually practical: turning a closed, limited device into something open that I control and can fix.

The side projects

I rarely leave a problem alone if I think I can build the solution myself. At work that has meant web-based dashboards for production monitoring. At home it has gotten more out of hand.

My cat has a custom GPS tracker. The lawn is cut by a ROS-based robotic mower whose navigation and firmware I tinker with. A Raspberry Pi drives an e-paper dashboard, and a Pico pushes pixels to an LED matrix whose datasheets I've had to reverse-engineer. I'm building QuickR, a QR-driven form and database builder, and I've written a virtual tabletop engine for board game nights and a script that watches the Stockholm stock exchange for signals. When I run out of things to build, I map buildings around Skällinge and Varberg for OpenStreetMap.

My biggest project right now is Toetravel, a self-hosted app for saving places and keeping trip journals. It brings together the travel and the tinkering: private spots like home, friends' places, and camps; trips with GPX tracks and photo albums; sharing with privacy controls like geofencing and follows; an importer that rescues my history from Google Takeout; and a feed that gives data back to OpenStreetMap. It runs Laravel on FrankenPHP with Postgres and PostGIS, self-hosted OSM vector tiles, Garage for photo storage, and Photon for geocoding, all in rootless Podman containers managed by Quadlet. I'm strict about it: no frontend build step, raw PostGIS queries instead of an ORM, local git only, and every change goes through a worktree that has to pass tests, static analysis, and formatting before it's merged.

All of this runs on my own infrastructure. I keep a home lab of servers and self-host as much as I reasonably can, because I'd rather own and understand my systems than rent them. Toetravel shows what that means in practice: my maps, my photos, my location history, on my hardware.

Outside work

Most of my days are spent behind screens, inside cabinets, or close to a circuit board, so in my free time I go outdoors. I ride mountain bike trails in the forest, go hiking, and travel backpacking style. No package tours: just a backpack, a rough plan, and room to change it. I usually bring a camera, and photography is a big part of how I experience places.

I still have quieter interests too. I'm an amateur astronomer and eclipse chaser, I keep a freshwater aquarium, and I play board games. But nature balances out the technical work. After a day of debugging, a forest trail clears my head better than anything else.