Contributed by mk/reverse on from the finally-laptop-tossing-can-be-in-the-olympics dept.
Jonathan Gray committed support for the Active Protection System accelerometer found in recent IBM laptops. He adds that there is a list of models that have it and an IBM whitepaper about it. If you want to see it in action, there is a video demonstrating a laptop suspending the harddrive while falling to the floor.
NOTE: Currently the driver does not attempt to suspend the laptop drive so don't start tossing around your laptop and complain that it broke.
This driver adds some sensors to the hw.sensors
sysctl(3) hierarchy. Some of these can be used with sensorsd(8) to do actions e.g. when the lid is opened or closed or when the keyboard is being used.
If you read Japanese, here are some design notes and an interview with the designers.
This work is based on information coming from a reverse engineering of the Windows driver by Mark Smith and Anurag Sharma. For Mac OS X, a tool for reading values off the Apple equivalent called Sudden Motion Sensor exists.
(Comments are closed)
By Daniel Hartmeier (195.234.187.87) on
The ThinkPad APS Accelerometer Interface (measure your car's acceleration through a laptop on the passenger seat)
The PowerBook Sudden Motion Sensor (visual games reacting to laptop movement)
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By Michael Knudsen (217.157.199.114) on
By jsg (210.15.216.215) on
wsmouse1 at aps0 mux 0
draw your own conclusions :)
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By djm (203.217.30.86) on
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By jsg (210.15.216.215) on
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By Anonymous Coward (195.224.109.30) on
It doesn't seem to notice if I switch between them.
By Anonymous Coward (68.148.1.194) on
By ViPER (213.84.93.41) viper@dmrt.net on http://www.dmrt.net
It's nothing more then a nice feature for the lad that worked his ass of for his private pocket paid laptop he uses on the job. A company (graphics design) where i'm doing the network administration right now has about 50 people with notebooks ranging from alienware show-off laptops to powerbooks etc. They render there workhorse `dead` if a key broke of the keyboard. (Damn Fly!) `rma hassle hassle, just get me a new one please` ..... I'm working about 4,5 years straight on my Dell Latitude X200...... No, i'm not `that` gentle with it, i'm just that lost without it ;/
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By rogern (69.229.254.123) baypos@hotmail.com on
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By jmcneill (207.179.178.226) on
Cheers,
Jared
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By seigemann (80.203.53.119) on
By Anonymous Coward (64.81.60.149) on
I'm still left wondering, why ô why has the driver to be involved in this? 'Emergency' head retract/park is the kind of feature that I would expect the drive itself to handle, independently of the OS, at least by default.
Seagate laptop drives for example can be heard parking if the power supply starts to dwindle; no driver involved (fortunately).
Back to the IBM/Hitachi drives: I usually turn my laptop on while grabbing it, ie _before_ heading towards the couch or whatever my workplace is going to be. What if I drop it then, while the OS is still in its early boot stage? Kaboom, sorry IBM, your protection didn't help here.
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By Brad (216.138.195.228) brad at comstyle dot com on
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By Anonymous Coward (131.202.10.5) on
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By Paladdin (80.58.46.107) on
By Anonymous Coward (193.63.217.208) on
By Nick Holland (68.43.117.34) nick@holland-consulting.net on http://www.openbsd.org/faq/
1: the drive was going to get dammaged, in which case, you probably would wish the thing had auto-parked.
2: The drive was going to survive that event...but having the hard drive suddenly go off line and the OS not expecting it, causes the OS to panic/bluescreen/whatever, resulting in possible corruption of the file system.
2a: The file system easily recovers: you cuss and swear, and you don't remember the drop, but you remember the crash and you think, "this computer is junk!".
2b: The file system (or valued files in it) is corrupted, in which case you are pretty close to where you were in case 1...
However...if you put hooks in the OS to deal with it semi-elegantly, you can get around all those problems, including the all-important image issue...and it will work with any brand disk, not just Brand X which happens to have a built-in drop sensor.
Practically? I've lost a few laptop disks, none of them were due to dropping the laptop. And yes, I've dropped a few laptops. In addition to being a clutz, I used to have a good demo I used to do where I would drop the laptop made by my (long-ago) employer several inches to the table...and invite the customer to do that with the competition's...then point out that it was my personal laptop, not a store demo I just did that with (same machine made a meter+ drop to a tile floor accidently...had to snap a few things back together, but worked fine). I think I stood on my laptop a few times, too. Don't know how many HDs are dammaged by dropping, but I suspect a lot more screens bite the dust that way than disks. In fact, I'd suspect one of the last parts to survive many laptop drops is the disk itself... i.e., I think it is 90% publicity stunt.
But having a sensor and drivers for it is cool. :)
Nick.
By Dunceor (130.238.5.5) on
By Matthieu Herrb (213.41.150.73) matthieu.herrb@laas.fr on