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Hacking the PowerBook 2005 Motion Sensor

Gizmodo has a cool story about how to re-pupose the motion sensor in the new 2005 PowerBook G4:

Amit Singh patched into the six-axis motion sensor in the new Apple Powerbooks?originally designed to measure quick movements, like drops, and park the hard drive to prevent damage?and wrote a program that rotates the windows based on the orientation of the laptop to the ground. But that’s not all it can do. Singh offers these examples:
– Panning across large maps (consider Google Maps: you slightly tilt the PowerBook backwards to go North, tilt it slightly to the left to go East, and so on)
– Vertical and horizontal scrolling in general, say, in a web browser
– Input for games (for example, a flight simulator)

The PowerBook Sudden Motion Sensor [KernelThread]


Gizmodo has a cool story about how to re-pupose the motion sensor in the new 2005 PowerBook G4:

Amit Singh patched into the six-axis motion sensor in the new Apple Powerbooks?originally designed to measure quick movements, like drops, and park the hard drive to prevent damage?and wrote a program that rotates the windows based on the orientation of the laptop to the ground. But that’s not all it can do. Singh offers these examples:
– Panning across large maps (consider Google Maps: you slightly tilt the PowerBook backwards to go North, tilt it slightly to the left to go East, and so on)
– Vertical and horizontal scrolling in general, say, in a web browser
– Input for games (for example, a flight simulator)

The PowerBook Sudden Motion Sensor [KernelThread]

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.