Tilting at ThinkPads
The ThinkPad range of laptops is famous for being droppable, partly because they seem to be able to withstand frightening events. Many IBMers have stories of a friend who dropped, or drove over a ThinkPad. One or two even claim to have survived theirs being oven baked. Ever since the T42, many ThinkPads have been equipped with the Active Protection System, which “can detect sudden changes in motion and temporarily stop the hard drive”. A nice feature, and one that was crying out to be re-purposed for something a little more… well… fun.
When I heard that a colleague had already worked out how to get the values out of the on-board accelerometers, I knew that it needed a quick front-end to show off the movement. I whisked up something using Ajax techniques to get the readings into Firefox and update some SVG in a very simple web page. The demo, although somewhat basic, certainly shows how intuitive tilting a laptop can feel, and could easily form the basis of a simple game. Thanks to Darren, who filmed me showing it off on Friday, the results are now online.
March 14th, 2006 at 15:10
The linux 2.6.14 kernel now contains the hdaps driver. This provides an interface to the system via /sys. This does not provide the auto-parking of hard drives, but a read-only view of the acceleration information.
There are already a number of applications that use this – including ones to do the hard drive protection. But more exciting, is a patch to the Super-Monkey-Ball-esque game Neverball.
I run the stock unbuntu 2.6.12 kernel at the moment on my X40 but this may well be the reason that leads me to break out a compiler and start patching.
March 14th, 2006 at 16:00
Nice! It’s things like this which make me increasingly interested in adopting Linux on my laptop.
March 16th, 2006 at 11:37
Digging around a bit more on this subject, I came across this article by Mark Smith, an IBMer at the Almaden Research site. The article talks about how he figured out how to access the accelerometer within linux.
More interestingly is the application he used it for; by strapping their laptops into the passenger seats of their cars, he and a colleague managed to prove whose car was faster by graphing the lateral and forward acceleration data produced.
March 21st, 2006 at 14:21
There are more links and some background on Active Protection System at ThinkWiki, the Linux ThinkPad wiki.
March 23rd, 2006 at 01:31
Really cool post!
March 23rd, 2006 at 19:48
[...] Tilting at Thinkpads [...]
April 2nd, 2006 at 22:18
Similar things for the Powerbook have been around for quite a while (a year?). I’ve seen at least one game, which emulated those wooden tilting-board-and-marble toys you used to get with, obviously, the laptop being the board.
June 22nd, 2006 at 19:17
[...] a modified version of SDL (the Simple DirectMedia Library) which supports the ThinkPad accelerometer in any game (on Windows or Linux) which uses the SDL to provide input. Using Mark’s modified library means you can tilt your way to a high score on all these games and more. [...]
March 14th, 2008 at 03:28
[...] – tilting the thinkpad draws a line, tilting it another way changes the direction, etc. Very cool!read more | digg [...]
March 16th, 2009 at 21:58
This advice is really going to help, thanks.
December 3rd, 2009 at 19:23
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