Arabella Simpson

Projects | Education | Skills | About Me

ATMega328 Gameboy

A custom gameboy made as presents for my family entirely from scratch. Powered by an ATMega328PU with a 320x240 TFT LCD display and 6 buttons on a custom PCB.

Key Features

• Custom assembled PCB
• ATMEGA328PU running C++ snake code
• 3xAAA batteries
• 320x240 ST7789 TFT LCD
• 6 pushbuttons

Phones Aren't Real

Challenging my attention span and the idea of a phone in a chaotic Raspberry Pi-powered robot bird, one teenage girl's mission to build an entire phone including notes, the weather, a camera and texts, as well as less conventional features like self-balancing, text-to-speech and a custom PCB and 3D printed shell.

The bird is powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero with a Raspberry Pi camera, a round touchscreen display, speaker, rechargeable battery, power and USB breakout boards, a USB microphone and a standard 4G modem dongle for internet and texts. It's a decidedly amateur build which pushed me to my limits as I struggled to compress a variety of incompatible libraries into the Pi's miniscule storage, teaching me about the backend of modems, image recognition algorithms, accelerometer boards and most importantly, the miracle that modern phones can fit all this and more in such as small rectangle and be so simultaneously boring and addictive.

I presented this project virtually at PyConAU 2025 in the Education Showcase, check out the short video explaining the project here on Youtube!

Key Features

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W running python code
• Round touchscreen display interface
• Custom PCB HAT for electronics
• 3D printed bird-shaped enclosure
• Telstra 4G USB Modem
• Servo and accelerometer for self-balancing
• Rechargeable battery circuit
• Camera, camera app and photo gallery
• Notes app with dictation and drawing-to-text
• Settings
• Speaker circuit for notifications
• Hopefully texts soon

Tori Tortoise

This is the documentation/code for Tori Tortoise, my year 9 and 10 Personal Project robot. The robot has 8 servos, 2 for each leg. It takes in positional data from an ultrasonic distance sensor, and its actions are reported on an OLED display.

Tori Tortoise was one of my first forays into robotics. Powered by an Arduino Uno, it had 4 independently moving legs and some semblance of a walk cycle, as well as being my first time soldering a prototyping board to reduce the size and the most iterations I have ever had for the fully 3D printed body.

I made this tortoise (an animal chosen because of its slowness and clumsiness, making my robot seem almost realistic) for my Year 9-10 MYP Personal Project, and it was one of the highlights of my school's exhibition, my segment from the school's marketing video for the night is here at 0:23 of the video..

Components

• Arduino Uno
• 8 micro servos
• HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor
• Power pack
• 1.3" OLED Display
• Arduino prototyping board

Spremium

A Spotify alternative which encourages listening to albums as they were intended, removing ads and scrambling from the music listening experience.

This is my Year 12 HSC Software Engineering Major Project, made with Flask and a SQLite database in the backend, which aims to liberate online music listening from megalomaniacal corporations. It is free, simple, does not require an account or a membership to use and, most importantly, allows users to listen to any song or album chronologically, without ads or random songs in the queue.

Technology

• Python
• Flask
• HTML, CSS and Javascript for web interface
• SQLite database

Longhouse Chronicles: A Viking's Journey

This game was made with pygame for my Year 10 Semester 2 IST Assessment.

Play as a Viking child earning his place on a Viking raid by completing tasks and helping people. Use the arrow keys to move and space to interact with objects and people. Press escape to exit gameplay and return to main menu. Once finished, you can press space to play again. This game is meant to teach people about the Vikings, but also to be a bit of fun. It includes a timer which you can use for speedrunning, and lots of features and fun facts.

Technology

• Pygame RPG game
• All graphics made by me in Pixilart

UFO Sightings Database

Year 10 SQL and Flask school project.

Using a public database of UFO sightings (NUFORC), and also with the ability to add your own, filter through sightings and view them on an interactive leaflet map.

Technology

• Python
• Flask web interface
• SQLite databse
• Leaflet custom map on HTML