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Experimenting With Light on Apple Laptops

Posted by Hemos on Mon Jun 19, 2006 09:19 AM
from the the-joy-of-light dept.
Hardware Hacking Apple
venkatg writes "Soon after Apple introduced sudden motion sensors in their PowerBooks in early 2005, Amit Singh had shown how these sensors can be used for creative purposes (covered by Slashdot earlier as Having Fun With PowerBook Motion Sensors and PowerBook As A New Kind Of Human Interface Device). This time around Singh discusses 'Experimenting With Light' in a new article whereby by light he means the ambient light sensors and the illuminated backlight keyboard sensors in Apple's laptops. The article shows (source code is included) how one can measure ambient light and do things with it. It also shows things like how to get/set illuminated keyboard brightness and display brightness or do fade transitions of the keyboard lighting. So now that we have all these motion and light sensors under control, is there a MacBook discotheque in the works?"

Related Stories

[+] Hardware: PowerBook As A New Kind Of Human Interface Device 276 comments
An anonymous reader writes "As covered earlier on Slashdot, Amit Singh had shown how to access and use the motion sensor feature in the late model PowerBooks for innovative things, which created quite a buzz in the Mac community. In an ingenius new article, Singh has taken the idea all the way and released software which lets you use a PowerBook with a motion sensor as a general purpose input device which works with existing apps. IMHO the coolest use of this is for playing games: be sure to check out the video footage in the article. For instance, in a car racing game, you steer by tilting the PowerBook left and right, go faster by tilting it forward, brake by tilting it backwards! You can also scroll in apps. Google Map scrolling with my PowerBook feels like flying in an aiprlane over the terrain. I must say you have to try this in real life to appreciate the experience ... go to the Apple store or something if you don't have the hardware ;-) Before this my girlfriend (who uses a Dell notebook) has never called anything computer related "jawdropping"! Wouldn't it be nice to have a gaming motion sensor be standard issue in all future laptops?"
[+] Having Fun With PowerBook Motion Sensors 81 comments
mjk325 writes "Amit Singh has published a discussion on the 'Sudden Motion Sensor' feature in the latest revision PowerBooks. One utility he has released displays a 3-D view of the PowerBook that follows the actual movement of the physical machine. Another utility creates windows that rotate in opposite directions to the physical machine to appear always straight. My brand new PB has the motion sensor, but apparently the utilities work on any system using software faking."
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  • Great (Score:3, Funny)

    by dubmun (891874) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:34AM (#15561093) Homepage Journal
    Now we can finally communicate with the aliens!

  • How does the keyboard backlight work? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ant P. (974313) <anthony.parsons@ m a n x .net> on Monday June 19 2006, @09:35AM (#15561099)
    Is it just one light, or can individual keys be lit up? You could do a lot more with it that way.

    • Re:How does the keyboard backlight work? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2006, @12:25PM (#15562193)
      The keyboard illumination does not allow for individual key lighting.

      The mechanism is a mat of fiber-optic cables which are illuminated by just two leds, which also cannot be independantly controlled.
      [ Parent ]

  • Just wait 'till the blackhats get ahold of this! (Score:4, Funny)

    by JonTurner (178845) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:36AM (#15561101) Journal
    (mumbles to self...) Let's see... motion sensors, ambient light sensors, lots of indicator LEDS, backlit keyboard. Yep, we've got everything we need!(/mumbles)

    Coming soon, from a black-hat hacker near you:
    Siezure-O-Rama 1.0 !! Now, with 38% more unconsciousness!

      • Re:North Korea (Score:3, Funny)

        by JonTurner (178845)
        >> But cannibalism is illegal in North Korea, so cannibals are summarily dragged into the street and shot in broad daylight in plain sight of everyone to serve as a lesson. And we're sitting here happily slapping our sausages over some blinky lights.

  • In the year 2000... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MudButt (853616) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:37AM (#15561104)
    It would be pretty cool if someone wrote a program that makes your keyboard randomly blink a la The Original Star Trek (or many other 60's sci-fi shows). Am I the only one that's still impressed by random flashing lights on a computer? I know... I'm easily ammused...

    • Re:In the year 2000... (Score:3, Informative)

      by qray (805206)
      While the lights on computers on sci-fi shows may have been random. Lights on real computers were hardly random. I worked with mini-computers that had a bank of LED's on the front. These corresponded to the bits of the CPU registers and CPU flags. A knowle
    • or how about a typing tutor that worked like the Billy Jean video with your fingers doing the walking?

      • Re:In the year 2000... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jacksonj04 (800021)
        Screw that. Get a tricolour LED behind every key, make the keycaps a tad more translucent, and tie it into iTunes. Throbbing keyboard visualiser.

  • Blackout Game (Score:5, Interesting)

    by VorpalRodent (964940) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:43AM (#15561130)
    I recall a game from not too long ago wherein one would push lighted buttons, and they would alternate the lighted status of those buttons around it. The objective was to turn off (or on, I forget) all the buttons on the unit.

    With this, assuming that each key has a light associated with it, one could do the same thing with a whole keyboard.

    And for those who don't have any issues with being violent towards their computers, you could reset it a la Etch-a-Sketch with the motion sensor.

    • Re:Blackout Game (Score:2, Informative)

      by tgpo (976851)
      Lights Out [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Blackout Game (Score:5, Funny)

      by mgabrys_sf (951552) on Monday June 19 2006, @10:56AM (#15561520) Journal
      20 bucks in shareware for anyone who can program me an etch-a-sketch plug in for photoshop that allows me to wipe a frustrating layout off the screen by me violently shaking the laptop. It would be far more cheaper than therapy.

      (of course one could surmise that anyone who wants this in leu of therapy might have issues - but I'd call those people just plain nuts)
      [ Parent ]

  • Before the Mac bashers go crazy with this one.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by King_TJ (85913) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:46AM (#15561143) Homepage Journal
    .... I don't think this article is here as another "Oooh.... the Macbook and Steve Jobs are awesome!" story. The intriguing part is how its users are "thinking different" to an extent Apple themselves didn't seem to. Already, people have taken the relatively boring "sudden motion sensor" that Apple only thought of implementing to help prevent hard drive crashes, and used it for a motion-sensing laptop security system, to roll marbles around in maze games by tilting the laptop, and even to switch virtual desktops by lightly tapping the left or right-hand sides of the machine to "bump" the desktop over one direction or the other.

    Now, they're tackling the ambient light sensors, which again, serve a relatively "boring" (if still useful) purpose. I'm intrigued to see what imaginative people will end up doing with this one too. For starters, I could envision some usefulness in things like making the backlit keyboard blink in a repeating pattern to indicate completion of recording in certain audio programs. (Many recording studio environments are kept dark so you can easily see all the readouts on the displays of the equipment while working. Macbook Pros are going to be popular in these environments, and it might be nice to get a subtle indication it finished transcoding or recording some audio - even if the display went blank due to a screen saver?)

  • The killer app (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2006, @09:52AM (#15561169)
    As soon as the light dims, iTunes will automatically start the Barry White playlist and some soft porn starts to play via Front Row. All that is left for you to do is to hug yourself and cry yourself to sleep, feeling oh so lonely, lonely, lonely.

  • Sounds like fun (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ronanbear (924575) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:54AM (#15561176)
    Don't really know if I see much useful application in it but I suppose it can't hurt. It could be really useful for power saving or even some scheduling stuff. It could also have some interesting security applications (say cover the light sensor as part of a keyboard combination)

    I saw a video of the sudden motion sensor being used to switch desktops and it looked really great. Good luck to anyone who thinks they can do something useful. Someday we could all benefit.

    I also find it interesting that sudden motion sensors were available on Thinkpads before Powerbooks but I never heard of people using them in different ways. That's a pretty good advert for Apple. Sums up the image that Apple put out much better than those TV ads.

  • Brilliant, New Mail indicator (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TristanBrotherton (857376) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:55AM (#15561178) Homepage
    Fantastic, I wanted to know how to do this so i could write a new mail indicator. Lots of itme i dont like my macbook to speak, so now i can write a script to pulse the keyboard backlights when i get mail. Brilliant, they are bright enough to blind bats so should be quite effective.

  • Other appication (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jackjeff (955699) on Monday June 19 2006, @10:18AM (#15561311)
    Erling Ellingsen has also been playing with the sudden motion and ambient light sensors. He hacked a Virtual Desktop tool, where you have to hit the laptop, or put your hand over a sensitive area, in order to change desktops.

    http://blog.medallia.com/2006/05/smacbook_pro.html [medallia.com]

  • or... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by m874t232 (973431) on Monday June 19 2006, @11:51AM (#15561934)
    you could just use the built-in camera, which lets you measure not just light levels, but even light levels at hundreds of thousands of pixels!

    • The backlights have been on there for years. (Score:4, Informative)

      by bellers (254327) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:59AM (#15561194) Homepage
      The backlighting isn't something that was invented for the new Macbooks. It's been on the PPC-based powerbooks (that had no heat problem) for at least 2-3 years. Transferring it to the MacBookPros was pretty much a zero-engineering proposition.

      Honestly, shut up until you know what you're talking about.
      [ Parent ]
    • Lets focus on basic principles first before adding superfluous features like magnetic power cables

      That's one of my favorite features... I went thru 3 power supplies on previous laptop from tripping over the power cable...

      • Re:Perhaps keyboard backlighting could flash (Score:4, Funny)

        by JonTurner (178845) on Monday June 19 2006, @10:16AM (#15561301) Journal
        And don't forget the "Ouch!Hot!Ow!Damn!(tm)" overtemp detection system. In the rare/rumored/unprovable event a MacbookPro(tm) reaches 195 degrees Celcius (as reported by those scurrilous rumor sites) the second- and third-degree burns on your thighs serve as a gentle reminder to take a nice little computing break. Get up. Stretch. Walk around a bit. Bandage wounds. Enjoy!

        Rumoured upgrade for os 1.5 -- face recognition engine uses built-in camera to detect pain threshold. Automatically throttles back CPU if user faints, or collapses from blood loss.
        [ Parent ]
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