I gave a lightning talk at PyCon on the phone scanner system that I built.  The slides are available on Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/sdfbqh

Here is a list of some of the cool modules and tools I used:

I used Pyserial (http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/) to access the serial port, which I used to read from the Arduino.  I used list_ports.grep() to find the Arduino COM port on Windows without manual configuration.

I used openpyxl to read the latest format of Excel workbooks: https://pythonhosted.org/openpyxl/.

I used Tim Golden’s excellent active_directory module to read all the employee details: http://timgolden.me.uk/python/active_directory.html

To access sharepoint I employed this module: https://github.com/ox-it/python-sharepoint. I had originally started using this module (yes, there are two Python sharepoint modules!!) https://pypi.python.org/pypi/haufe.sharepoint but I ran into problems due to the underlying use of suds and our office HTTP proxy.

I used VideoCapture (http://videocapture.sourceforge.net/) which is a Windows specific Python module for accessing frames from a USB webcam.  This was the only way I found to read from a webcam in Windows using Python.

To recognise QR codes I used the Zbar library (http://zbar.sourceforge.net/) which has a Python module available.

In order to package up the application into a single EXE file for easy distribution, I used pynistaller (http://www.pyinstaller.org/).  I looked at py2exe (http://www.py2exe.org/) originally but I found pyinstaller a bit easier and it made a nice single file executable.

For my slides I was searching for a simple HTML5 presentation template and came across DZSlides (http://paulrouget.com/dzslides/) which I found pretty easy to use.  I didn’t have to do much CSS fettling to get the slides to display nicely.