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Experimenting With Light on Apple Laptops

Posted by Hemos on Mon Jun 19, 2006 08:19 AM
from the the-joy-of-light dept.
Businesses 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?"
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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, @08:34AM (#15561093) Homepage Journal
    Now we can finally communicate with the aliens!

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

    by Ant P. (974313) on Monday June 19 2006, @08:35AM (#15561099) Homepage
    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, @11:25AM (#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.
      • It would be a cool concept, much like some "training keyboards" (of the musical variety) which light up keys for you to follow along. Now in reality I'd question how much someone can learn by just pressing the lighted key rather than really learning things properly (or by the all-black Das Keyboard!), but I suppose it could at least help you get a feel for it. However, as far as I can tell, you can only change the intensity of the backlight as a whole, not the individual keys, and the strength of the back
  • (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!

      • >> 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.

        Torrent?

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

    by MudButt (853616) on Monday June 19 2006, @08:37AM (#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...

    • It would look better if the keys were lit independently. But as I understand, you can only control the overall keyboard brightness. This would look as if some circut gets overloaded and the keyboard doesn't get enough power.
      What would be better is keys that light independently - imagine keys flashing in rows or in circles (like sound waves in water) or in random order, looking like old-school mainframes shown in movies.
    • 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 knowledgeable person could potentially figure out the crash location and some of the state of the machine during a crash. So the sci-fi shows weren't all inaccurate. Though it's reason for being in the movies is much like the sound of space ships roaring by in o
    • or how about a typing tutor that worked like the Billy Jean video with your fingers doing the walking?

  • Blackout Game (Score:5, Interesting)

    by VorpalRodent (964940) on Monday June 19 2006, @08:43AM (#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.

    • Lights Out [wikipedia.org]
        • Yeah, the handheld Lights Out game came out at about the same time I started playing with GUIs, and I got into the habit of using it as a "Hello World" project when I am learning a new Windowing Toolkit. I think I have versions for GTK, WxWindows, Borland C++ Builder, LabWindows, Swing, SWT, and Winforms (C#) all laying around somewhere.

    • I have the game. It's called Lights Out. Here [hasbro.com] is the manufacturer's page (it's made by Tiger [tigerelectronics.com]), and here [clara.co.uk] is an interesting page about it.

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

      by mgabrys_sf (951552) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:56AM (#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)
  • .... 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?)
    • ...that this shit has been around as components for PCs (the 'IBM' kind, I know a Mac is a PC) for a long time now. Yet nobody's been running out to buy these as extras to have this sort of fun with. The only thing 'Apple' should be credited with is adding them out of the box indeed... it's the users who are finally having fun with it, because it's there without having to pay extra and attach devices.

      That said.. those new SONY VAIOs (OMG ROOTKIT PONIES!) have a fingerprint reader built-in... c'mon VAIO us
      • I suppose the thing is that before Apple did it, there was no way of getting access to the sensor data. I have a laptop with tha hard drive sensor in it, but the sensor is claimed by the "ACPI motion sensor" driver. Instead, the Apple driver outputs a simple value accessible from userspace.

        I know you can get accellerometer and other sensors for the PC easily, but they were usually external, and internal built in ones were usually hidden from software view. All it took was Apple to start making it easy to ac
    • Just an observation, as nobody has mentioned it, this is not restricted to just Macs. Some, if not all, of the new Sony Vaio laptops incorporate this to minimize damage to the hard drives if a light physicsl shock to the system occurs.

      If you shake it like an etch-a-scetch you get a window that pops up and tells you the heads are being moved to a safer place or something similiar. The one I saw doing it had an Intel core duo chip in it. A fine piece of machinery. Until something simple broke in the mouse

  • The killer app (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2006, @08:52AM (#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.
      • Take a lesson from the Sidekick/hiptop!


        What? and provide a weak security mechanism that can easily be web accessed to leak Paris Hilton's celebrity contacts?

  • Sounds like fun (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ronanbear (924575) on Monday June 19 2006, @08:54AM (#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, @08:55AM (#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.
    • Nifty cool and all that, and you probably already know what I'm about to tell you, but you can already get Mail to flash the screen instead of beeping if the sound is off. Go into System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Hearing and check "Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs".
  • With a little effort, we can swap out these weak lights with high-intensity lasers! I've always wanted a lappy with a "Real Genius" death ray. Plus, I could use it to make popcorn.

  • auto screen lock - if laptop is not moved for X seconds, lock the screen - analagous to someone using on their lap putting it down on a table

    burglar alarm - if laptop is moved, send a distress call

    intruder detector - if a beam of light shone onto light detector flickers, then intruder detected

  • Other appication (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jackjeff (955699) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:18AM (#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]
  • All you need to do now is strap the laptop to your head (duct tape) and go to the disco. As you dance, the motion sensors and light sensors cause the lights and sound of your Apple laptop to "dance" in time to the music and your cool moves.

    We all knew that Apple users were already "way cool" and this will put them over the top. There's no way we can compete now.

  • So now that we have all these motion and light sensors under control is there a MacBook discotheque in the works?

    The MacBooks don't have a lit keyboard or an ambient light sensor, only the MacBook Pros do.

  • I smell updates for all popular Mac GBA emulators coming :-)

    Finally, a properly emulated version of Boktai [wikipedia.org] for Macs! Or maybe even an official Mac version? One can dream, can't one? :-)

  • or... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by m874t232 (973431) on Monday June 19 2006, @10:51AM (#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!
  • First developer to make a MacBook do this [google.com] will receive 1,000 points, and quite possibly the Coolest Mac App of the Year award. :-)

    • You didn't know MacHeat(TM) was a feature in and of itself? Just fold your book down and place your Starbuck's ® coffee mug on top of it. Vwa-la! Your coffee is hot for hours.

      Those mac guys are so clever.. and the PCs are so user friendly!

      • 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.
    • The thermal problem is something with the way the thermal paste is applied on the CPU, not the number of fans it has. Besides, light detection hardware, i.e. a photoresistor, costs pennies and fits on a screwhead.

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

      by bellers (254327) on Monday June 19 2006, @08:59AM (#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.
    • All Apple laptops get really hot, especially why they are really used. Last summer I was doing one particular project on my Powerbook, I thought is was going to melt. But all engineering is a compromise, and one compromise Apple makes is to try not have it's computers imitate vacuum cleaners.

      So the principles of engineering, the one that most companies ignore, is to create an optimized system. There is no reason to put in high speed hardware with a slow bus, even though such a thing might look good in

      • Re:Perhaps keyboard backlighting could flash (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ronanbear (924575) on Monday June 19 2006, @09:28AM (#15561366)
        Apple should use the motion sensor to detect when the powerbook is likely to be being used on a lap and automatically lower the power usage to reduce the temperature. That would be a really good way to show off the motion sensor.
          • I imagine that it would be something along the lines of throttling back if the laptop appears to be moving slightly at regular intervals.
          • When a laptop is resting on a lap it is very rarely exactly horizontal. They also tend to move around a little continuously. Maybe planes and trains could easily fool the system but that's not important as there would have to be a bypass in any case.

            Basically there are 3 sensors which could be combined to good effect. The ambient light sensor might be useful (not very likely), the accelerometer and the cpu thermometer. Your legs are usually warmer than room temperature and conduct heat differently. The co

    • 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...

    • I think the percentage of Slashdot readers using Apple portables is much higher than 7% based on the number of Mac-centric news articles and user postings, so I think it is interesting news to a lot of us (although I won't be the one swinging my 'book around like a lightsaber). And as the slogan says, it's 'News for Nerds', and it doesn't get much nerdier than this.

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