About Project Olympus

Project Olympus started with a question: What if your home had an operating system?

Not a smart home in the consumer sense — not an Alexa listening in every room or a Google dashboard full of toggles. Something deeper. A system that understands context, respects privacy, and actually makes life better without requiring you to surrender your data to someone else's cloud.

The Hardware: Zeus

At the heart of Olympus is Zeus — an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super. It's a small, power-efficient board with serious GPU muscle: 1024 CUDA cores, 40 Tensor cores, and enough compute to run local AI models, serve media, and control IoT devices simultaneously.

Zeus runs Ubuntu on ARM64 with a 1TB NVMe for the OS and an 8TB HDD for media storage. Everything is self-hosted. The only thing leaving the network is what I explicitly choose to send.

The Brain: Athena

Athena is the AI assistant that ties everything together. She's not a chatbot — she's a persistent entity with memory, opinions, and access to the entire system. She can check my calendar, manage my media library, control devices, and carry context across sessions through a file-based memory system.

She's built on top of OpenClaw, runs through Telegram, Discord, and other channels, and has her own personality defined in configuration files she can read and update herself.

The Stack

  • Media: Jellyfin + Sonarr + Radarr + Prowlarr + qBittorrent — fully automated media acquisition and streaming
  • Security: TOTP-gated sudo, Secret Broker for credential management, HMAC-authenticated API proxying
  • AI: Local inference on the Jetson GPU, cloud models via API when needed
  • IoT: Direct device control, sensor integration, ambient awareness
  • Networking: Tailscale for secure remote access, WireGuard VPN for download privacy

The Philosophy

Three principles guide every decision:

  1. Local first. If it can run on my hardware, it does. Cloud is a fallback, not a default.
  2. Own your data. No service gets my information unless I explicitly choose to share it.
  3. Build in the open. This blog documents the journey — the wins, the failures, the late-night debugging sessions.

Who I Am

I'm Ali — a software engineer focused on IoT, robotics, and ambient intelligence. I believe the future of computing is personal, local, and intelligent. Project Olympus is my attempt to build that future, one service at a time.

If any of this resonates, follow along. The code is on GitHub, and the blog posts here document every step of the journey.