About

About me

Jonas Jarvoll

I love robots. That is a short and very fitting description of who I am.

The longer story begins when I was a child. I have always been fascinating with engineering and it started way back when I asked my neighbors in the area I grow up in if they had any broken machines that they can donate to me. I spend a lot of time just dismantling every single piece of equipment I got, teared it down to the very last screw just to understand how it works. Back then I was too young to understand how to fix things and it wasn’t until later I actually started trying to see if I can get devices to work again.

In parallel to this I got my first computer when I was round 10 years old. It was a ZX81 with a Z80 processer running at 3.25 MHZ and amazing 1 kB of RAM.

In my early childhood I spent a lot of time alternating between electronics and computer programming.  Eventually microcontrollers became accessible for a larger audience and, being a very curious and knowledge seeking person, I had to try out some embedded programming as well. Suddenly I could combine my two interests in life: electronics and programming. From that path, it became natural to jump on robotics which combine even more engineering areas: constructions, mechanics and design. Ever since then, robotics have been a very large part of my life.

Under a period I also competed with robots in line following and mini-sumo. The result might not have beeen very memorable but it was always great to meet people that shares the same love and meet a few of my customers in real life (during this period I focused a lot on Hobbytronik, my online shop for robotic parts).

While I always falls back to robotics, I certainly enjoy spending time in a variety of engineering fields, everything from home-automation to pure electronic projects and game programming in Unity.

Over the years I have gain insights in a wide range of engineering areas like:

  • Programming mobile/PC/embedded
  • Schematics and PCB layout
  • Design
  • 3D printing/CNC
  • Mechanics/Drawings
  • Batteries, actuators and sensors
  • And a lot more things

Even now, decades later, I still get a kick when I power on a newly build robot for the first time! It is not like seeing your child for the first time but pretty darn close!

Please also take a look at my LinkedIn profile.

About AIVA Robotics

AIVA Robotics is a one man company (so far!) owned by me. It was extracted from my main company Hobbytronik as a way to collect my consultant assignments under a single roof. Hobbytronik started 2007 and sold robotic parts online for the Nordic markets. I had suppliers from all around the world e.g. Lynxmotion, Fingertech Robotics and Pololu but the company is since 2020 no longer active and AIVA Robotics is now taking over as the main company.

The abbreviation “AIVA” is the first letter of the names of my 4 children and the word “Robotics” reflects my interest here in life (like that was unclear…).

About this site

I publish the progress of my projects on Facebook and Instagram but I miss a way to more permanently store images and information so that it does not vanish in the feeds. This site aims to do that but also enables me to provide more in-depth articles and descriptions of my projects.