27 Sep 08 Camera Mouse
Using just a simple webcam it is possible to track your eyes and head movement in such a way that you can actually control the computer mouse. You can also simulate mouse clicks just by blinking (a left blink would be a left-click, right blink naturally is a right-click)
This might be very useful for example for people with disabilities who can not use a regular mouse (and where the normal solutions tend to very expensive since they require specialized hardware such as infrared tracking cameras, whereas only a plain webcam is neccassary here)
The whole system is written in Python, using the Intel OpenCV library and SciPy.
Tags: python
25 Sep 08 ICFP programming contest
This July I (together with and 3 other people - Janto Dreijer, Pieter Holtzhausen and Albert Swart) entered a team in the ICFP programming contest.
The problem was to navigate a robotic rover though some alien terrain, while avoiding rocks, craters and evil martians. We wrote everything in Python, and tried several different approaches but in the end settled on a simple obstacle avoidance algorithm. Given that the martians in the sample server were not very smart we ignored them for the first run, and only start active avoidance if we see more than 5 of them at the same time.
I think our solution in the end was pretty decent. Our entry of AntiCylonDefenseTeamImpersonator actually ended in first place in the initial round. (though to be fair, we did share that spot with 18 other teams 
) In the end we dropped out at round 4, apparently our rover crashed into a crater. (though through our own testing we cannot duplicate that..)
We’ll definitively be back next year. (Janto also has good writeup)
