My Final Year Project working in the HIT lab

Well it looks like I got my first choice for final year projects, Sweet!

Project: Robust Low Cost Eye Tracking.

The HIT Lab NZ is interested in developing hardware and software for a robust low cost eye tracker that could be used for computer interfaces that respond to eye gaze. The hardware should be a head worn camera with Infra Red LED that shines in the eye and detects the reflection. Simple image processing software can then be used to detect the point of maximum reflection and so track the eye gaze point.

The hit lab already has an early working version of this, the goal of this project is to explore alternative hardware designs and develop more robust software to work with the hardware. Work can be based on the OpenEyes platform.

If there is sufficient time - an application showing how eye gaze could be used in a computer interface.

Could have my work cut out for me this year!

Driveby contribution to Python Cryptography

While at PyConAU 2016 I attended the Monday sprints and spent some time looking at a proposed feature I hoped would soon be part of cryptography . As most readers of this blog will know, cryptography is a very respected project within the Python ecosystem and it was an interesting experience to see how such a prominent open source project handles contributions and reviews. The feature in question is the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange algorithm used in many cryptography applications. Diffie-Helman Key Exchange is a way of generating a shared secret between two parties where the secret can't be determined by an eavesdropper observing the communication. DHE is extremely common - it is one of the primary methods used to provide "perfect forward secrecy" every time you initiate a TLS connection to an HTTPS website. Mathematically it is extremely elegant and the inventors were the recipients of the 2015 Turing award . I wanted to write about this particular contribution becau...

Matplotlib in Django

The official django tutorial is very good, it stops short of displaying data with matplotlib - which could be very handy for dsp or automated testing. This is an extension to the tutorial. So first you must do the official tutorial! Complete the tutorial (as of writing this up to part 4). Adding an image to a view To start with we will take a static image from the hard drive and display it on the polls index page. Usually if it really is a static image this would be managed by the webserver eg apache. For introduction purposes we will get django to serve the static image. To do this we first need to change the template. Change the template At the moment poll_list.html probably looks something like this: <h1>Django test app - Polls</h1> {% if object_list %} <ul> {% for object in object_list %} <li><a href="/polls/{{object.id}}">{{ object.question }}</a></li> {% endfor %} </ul> {% else %} <p>No polls...

Python and Gmail with IMAP

Today I had to automatically access my Gmail inbox from Python. I needed the ability to get an unread email count, the subjects of those unread emails and then download them. I found a Gmail.py library on sourceforge, but it actually opened the normal gmail webpage and site scraped the info. I wanted something much faster, luckily gmail can now be accessed with both pop and imap. After a tiny amount of research I decided imap was the better albiet slightly more difficult protocol. Enabling imap in gmail is straight forward, it was under labs. The address for gmail's imap server is: imap.gmail.com:993 Python has a library module called imaplib , we will make heavy use of that to access our emails. I'm going to assume that we have already defined two globals - username and password. To connect and login to the gmail server and select the inbox we can do: import imaplib imap_server = imaplib . IMAP4_SSL ( "imap.gmail.com" , 993 ) imap_server . login ( use...

Bits of py

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