Marinor's autonomous vessel

Marinor is a technical student organisation at NTNU — "where robotics meet the sea" — building autonomous maritime vessels in Trondheim. I joined in October 2025 and have done a large share of the hardware on its vessel: electrical systems, battery and power, and mechanical work.

Building inside an organisation is a different discipline from building alone. Subsystems have owners, interfaces have to be agreed before they exist, and a decision you make about a connector or a mounting point turns up three weeks later as somebody else's problem. Most of what I know about documenting hardware so another person can pick it up, I learned here.

Two months in, Andreas Lindeman and I started our own team to enter the same competition. I have been on both sides of the Njord start line since — an unusual place to stand, and a very fast way to learn what different approaches cost.