IKVM.NET Weblog

Any chance of a picture of it in action? You're crazy, btw... =o)

Hey Jeroen, you should modify your app so that it integrates under the acceleration curve. This way you could get time-to-velocity and time-to-distance measurements from your device and use it to measure 0-60 and 0-1/4 mile acceleration times using your laptop! This might give me a reason to get a T41p (that and the 128MB graphics card :)

In a previous life I used to work on software to do just that, for the oil industry (tracking where you are while drilling a hole). See http://www.bakerhughes.com/inteq/evaluation/mwd/navitrak2.htm for an example of such a tool.
But I'm not sure I feel comfortable using my ThinkPad for this ;-)

Have you considered the lucrative "rolling marbles around a maze" videogame segment?

With a sufficiently accurate 3d model of your environment, could this be used to make the display of the laptop transparent? ;)

(You'd also need an indication of the angle between keyboard and screen to do this, I guess - does the laptop have that?)

Are you going to actually implement the "make your desktop level" hack for Longhorn? I'd love to see a photo or video of that in action ;)

I don't think there is a sensor to determine the angle between keyboard and display. That would be cool though.

I might implement the Longhorn desktop levelling, but it'll be a while, because you really need the desktop compositing engine and I don't think that's in the current release.

Another application: half-fill the screen with simulated water, and have it slosh around realistically as you move the laptop. Or any number of different variations on the "the screen's a box with something in it that behaves realistically" theme: Balls that just stay still until you shake the laptop and they start bouncing around; the standard "aquarium" screensaver but with the fish getting startled when their world gets bounced all over the place, other animals, the marbles-in-a-maze thing suggested earlier, use your computer as an egg-timer by standing it up like a christmas card and then turning it upside down...

The number of useless but fascinating things you can do with this hardware is endless... :)

Hmmm - I've got it...

Etch-a-sketch - nothing special with the regular UI - however when you shake your machine - boom, a nice smearing erasure....

Can you post an executable for those of us who can't compile C# code?

The executable (requires .NET Framework 1.1) is downloadable here:
http://www.frijters.net/horizon.zip

Do you know why it isn´t working with Windows Vista?

Thanks for posting this, it helped me out.

I wrote up an explanation and brief guide to accessing the sensor data on a Thinkpad from within a .NET application (the source is in C#). I provide calibration data, example code, a command-line executable for viewing / capturing the sensor data, and a small GUI application that graphically displays the x- and y-tilt values in real-time.

You can find the tutorial, etc. at:

http://www.stanford.edu/~bsuter/thinkpad-accelerometer/

Here's my accelerometer app...

http://8r13n.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/it%e2%80%99s-bedtime/