The longer story

It starts with a crossbow

I started woodworking in primary school and, predictably, the first thing I wanted to make was a crossbow. Around the same time — eight to ten — I was building robots out of LEGO. Two different materials, one instinct: work out how a mechanism ought to behave, build it, find out whether you were right.

Aviation, age twelve

At twelve I became completely absorbed by aviation and started building drones and model aircraft. That hobby lasted years and quietly taught me most of my early electronics — soldering, LiPo handling, flight controllers, and what a badly tuned control loop does to an airframe. It is the single most useful thing I did as a kid.

Middle school: motors, packs and a 3D printer

In middle school I started building electric longboards from the ground up, and around the same time several e-bikes and the battery systems to run them — for myself, for friends, for family. Building a pack that someone else is going to ride every day and charge in their hallway is where I stopped treating battery design as a means to an end and started treating it as the interesting part.

Then I got my first 3D printer, which changed the economics of everything. A part I wanted could exist by morning. It also started my CAD habit — Fusion 360 has been my most-used piece of software ever since. Fairly quickly I modified the printer with a special extruder for flexible filament, and began experimenting with flexible parts and printing directly onto shirts.

Kuben: other people who build things

At Kuben videregående skole I took studiespesialisering med teknologifag og realfag, and for the first time I was surrounded by people with the same habit. I ended up being the person the school called when the 3D printers stopped working, and learned printer maintenance properly on their Ultimaker 2. When they were throwing out an old printer frame in pieces, a friend and I took it and rebuilt it into a watercooled machine. It never went into production, but it moved and ran under its own power, which was the point.

Around then I also got a CNC router — an Ooznest WorkBee — and learned CAM and subtractive manufacturing. Mostly smaller furniture pieces and gifts, machined from aluminium and from oak recycled out of old kitchen worktops.

A year off, then two years in the air

After Kuben I took a gap year: carpentry for a family — a decking build and a kitchen — and shifts at ASKO, a food distribution warehouse.

Then I went to Folkehøgskolen Nord-Norge for the air sports year: paragliding, speedriding and skydiving. It was as good as it sounds, and I stayed a second year as a stipendiat — part second-year student, part staff, assistant instructor on the paragliding programme, and the bridge between the students and the staff. That second year was hard work and the most useful thing I have done for my own sense of responsibility and discipline.

NTNU

In autumn 2024 I started at NTNU in Trondheim on the Elektronisk systemingeniør bachelor. I am in my third year now, and I like essentially all of it.

Most of the real engineering happens around the coursework. I am in TekKom, the tech committee at Linjeforeningen Elektra, where we maintain and develop elektra.io. I led Elektraverkstedet, Elektra's makerspace, for the 2025–2026 term, which also put me on Elektra's board and made me the association's representative to other student associations at NTNU.

In October 2025 I joined Marinor, a technical organisation at NTNU that builds autonomous boats, and did a large share of the hardware on its vessel — electrical systems, battery and power, and the mechanical side.

By Christmas that year, Andreas Lindeman and I had started our own team to enter the same competition. He is not part of Marinor; we wanted to build our own boat and race it against Marinor and everyone else at the NJORD Challenge. That team was called Ligmax, and so was the boat: a self-stabilising autonomous trimaran built by two people, with hull, power, electronics, perception and autonomy all done in-house.

The team has since become Dialga — still just the two of us — and we are building Mobula for NJORD 2027. So I have spent these years on both sides of the same start line, inside a full organisation and inside a team of two.

Alongside that, Arceus, a car driven over 4G, also with Andreas.

The thread

Different materials, same job. I like the point where a design stops being a model and has to survive the real world — vibration, salt water, weather, and people using it in ways you did not plan for. That is the part I am good at, and it is the part I want to keep doing.