During the Blender PT Conference 2013 that was organized in Oporto in 6-7 April this year, I made a presentation about an article I submitted to show how Python can be used to make repetitive tasks a lot easier.
In the example of the article, I wanted to show population statistics of the 308 Portuguese counties for different years, by placing the respective region with a height proportional to the statistical data like in this image. It would be a pain to change all the regions height one by one so I described how to create a python script to read the data from an external file and to change each region height automatically.
Additionally I show how to create automatic key frames so that it is easy to animate the data along time and how to create a personalized menu in the Blender interface to make it more user friendly.
I deliver now the article and the example files for anyone to explore it, to learn from it and to modify it or improve it if you want. You can download it here.
In the following video you can see an example of an animated presentation of population statistical data.

These last weeks I've been busy preparing my presentations for the Blender PT Conference 2013. I'll post here the presentations and article soon but apart from that I also prepared this Slot Machine we used to raffle of several prizes during the conference.
It was made with BGE and we created a fully functional stand alone executable for the conference. Here I present the .blend file, without the textures and sounds since they could not be re-distributed but you have the references in the .blend file if you want to re-create it like us or you can use your own textures and sounds.
You can tell in the .blend file the number of participants and they will be randomly drawn without repetition each time you click on the lever. In the same directory of the .blend file two .json files will be created, one with the list of the numbers still to be drawn and another for backup. You must delete these .json files each time you want to start a new raffle from scratch or if you change the number of participants, otherwise it will use the available list in those files. You can download it here to explore, change it or use it in every way you want, but please credit the authors.