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.

14 thoughts on “Tilting at ThinkPads

  1. 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.

  2. Nice! It’s things like this which make me increasingly interested in adopting Linux on my laptop.

  3. 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.

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  5. 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.

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  9. 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.
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