Greg In The Desert

The 2005 Powerbooks that came out a few weeks ago have this cool new ” Sudden Motion Sensor”, it’s purpose is to detect sudden movement of the computer and park the heads on the hard dive to prevent damage. I can attest to how cool this is, my IBM T41 at work has this same technolgy. It even has a littel control panel that shows realtime movement of the computer.

Kernalthread has a pretty decent, not overly technical, explanation on how this thing works.

While I have no knowledge of how AMS works internally, it quite likely uses a “silicon” sensor based on integrate micro-electromechanical systems (iMEMS) technology. Acceleration or inclination causes an electrical property o the sensor, say capacitance, to be altered. The sensor’s interface can appropriately translate these tiny changes t present them as orientation “readings”

Since Apple didn’t provide any software to see the orientation of the computer, Kernalthread came up with a little program called AMSvisualizer that does the same basic thing.

They also came up with a cool program that, based on the motion sensor data, keeps the windows in the user interface always in the correct orientation. So if you tip your computer on it’s side, the windows stay right side up.