Who is actually writing this.

It starts in the Andaman Islands. My father was an army officer posted there, and growing up on an island teaches you quickly what it costs when the power and the supplies both have to arrive by boat. That is where the interest in making things locally comes from, and it is the reason the rest of this reads the way it does.

I studied mechatronics, robotics and automation at the Manipal Institute of Technology, and ran the robotics team there. In June 2013, at nineteen, Rohit Asil and I founded Fracktal Works because we were tired of waiting weeks for parts. Thirteen years later it is seven machines, more than 2,000 industrial customers and past 7,000 parts, for people including Ashok Leyland, TVS Motor, Godrej, Decathlon and several IITs.

In 2023 I won the Grand Prize of the Hackaday Prize — the top award, in the final year of its ten-year run — for an electromechanical refreshable Braille module. Each dot is moved by a printed cam holding a magnet a millimetre across, in place of the piezo stack that has kept Braille displays out of most readers' hands. It is published as open hardware, build logs and all.

Before that, a wind turbine you can download and print, which went to Antarctica on an expedition with 2041 and Robert Swan. Before that, Tipo, a Braille keypad that took Best Design in 2017. Alongside all of it, Arduino for Kids, written with Priya Kuber and Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar, on the theory that the right time to meet a microcontroller is before somebody tells you it is hard.

Now there are four companies rather than one: the printer manufacturer, a satellite payload team I consult to, a fixture-design product and an agent-run company OS. All four, and my actual role in each.

I live and work in Bengaluru. I publish nearly everything, which is why there is a lot of it to find.