Olaf Woodall
Olaf Woodall (born 2005) is an American engineer, founder and writer. He is the co-founder and CEO of Nostia and a mechanical engineering student at the Colorado School of Mines. His work spans drone hardware, AI systems and history writing.
Early life
Woodall grew up in Lee, New Hampshire, and attended Oyster River High School. He was a docent at the Lee Historical Society and competed in youth bridge in New England.
Nostia
Woodall co-founded Nostia with Will Chadwick in 2025, organized as Nostia LLC in New Hampshire, and runs it as CEO. Its product, Nostia-Orgs, is the one app a university connects through: every club, every meeting and verified attendance at all of them, with chat and announcements built in, plus AI campus tours and the orientation events an institution hosts. The student app is live on the iOS App Store; Nostia-Orgs launches for the Fall 2027 semester. The company has a five-person team.
Woodall built and runs most of Nostia's production stack himself while studying full time: the native Swift and SwiftUI app, a Node.js, Express and SQLite backend, payments on Stripe Connect v2 with Apple Pay, and the server it all runs on. The backend began on a managed hosting platform whose ephemeral containers wiped the database on every deploy; he moved it to a self-managed Linux server with Nginx, PM2, TLS and automated daily backups. He also carried payments through a full migration to Connect v2's new account model.
Drones and hardware
Impact-recovery quadcopterIn progress
A 5-inch, 6S dual-battery quadcopter designed to survive impacts below 40 mph and keep flying. Elastic TPU motor mounts absorb the impact, and recovery combines a contact bumper with differential motor power applied just before impact. An offline vision-language model analyses each flight afterwards, but it is deliberately kept out of the real-time control loop: Woodall evaluated its latency and found it too slow to sit between the sensors and the motors.
Tethered safety system
A drone safety system that pairs a fiber-optic tether with a Starlink link, tested against live AI systems.
Drone PingShipped
A proximity kill-switch built on an ESP32-C3 using ESP-NOW peer-to-peer radio, with the hardware confirmed working. Woodall fixed a MOSFET drive problem by switching to a logic-level part (IRLZ44N) that fully saturates at a 3.3 V gate, and corrected the power topology so the switch cuts motor power only, not the main battery rail. The code is public on GitHub.
Woodall holds an FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot certificate. At Mines he leads the accumulator subsystem, the car's high-voltage battery pack, on the Formula SAE team.
AI work
AI-run development loopIn progress
An experiment in whether a low-oversight, AI-run development workflow can produce working product, using an open-source Discord contribution system as the test vehicle. It follows an earlier harness Woodall built that read the app's user data each day and proposed updates for his approval.
Model distillationIn progress
Research on distilling frontier models, evaluated against non-traditional benchmarks.
Adventure PageIn progress
An AI-driven discovery feature for Nostia, built on a DeepSeek 1.5B model fine-tuned locally with LoRA and served from dedicated inference infrastructure.
His current self-study covers organoid computing, analog LLMs and neuromorphic chips.
Side projects
Smarter Than A Crow
A quiz web app at smarterthanacrow.app with a paintball mortar calculator, Mortar Mode, hidden inside it. Mortar Mode models the shot's arc with an RK4 drag model, reads the launch pitch from the phone's motion sensors, and opens only behind a tap sequence. The app has no backend: it runs on GitHub Pages, keeps its state in localStorage, and takes its questions from a single JSON file. Woodall built it because, in his words, the joke was worth the physics.
Writing
Woodall is writing a nonfiction book on moral judgment in history, examined through historical figures such as Oliver Cromwell, with Ottoman history running alongside it. He has written long-form essays on the Crusades, labor systems in the Gulf and U.S. arms policy, and is writing a fantasy novel in third-person limited with an isekai structure.
Personal life
Woodall lives in Golden, Colorado. He has experimented with polyphasic sleep, and his engineering interests run to thermodynamics and structural mechanics.