Powerbook’s ams sudden motion sensor
This is just another one of those very cool things about the new Powerbooks. According to Amit Singh’s article of the same name, Apple added an accelerometer (motion sensor) to the 2005 series powerbook motherboards to help detect ‘gravity-accelerated impact events’ (dropping the thing) so the system can ‘unpark’ the heads of the hard drive. Turned out Mr. Singh found he could tap into the chip and do some other cool stuff.
He offers some applications on the page to download and play with. One cool suggestion he makes is that it might be possible to write an integration to google maps, where you could tip the powerbook slightly left or right to scroll the map. You might be able to make a computer version of the old ‘Labyrinth’ steel-ball-in-a-maze game.
Do I have ams? pmset -g will list the power management utilities. Look for ‘ams’, a ‘1′ indicates it is active (on), ‘0′ indicates it is not (off)
Comment posted on 8-7-2005
Yes! I have played with on the new models at work. Too cool.
Comment posted on 8-7-2005
I’ve played with his ‘AMSVisualizer’ for a little while here too which is
only a little cooler than the command line utility that displays x,y, and z
co-ordinates in real time. heh - too geeky