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From: Dominic-Luc Webb on 31 Mar 2008 13:45

For those interested, below is the reference about my
earlier post about accelerometers. These are the
devices that detect sudden changes in velocity of
a notebook computer and move the read/write heads
of the harddisk to a safe parking spot where the
disks won't get damaged. Reference is:

Erik Vance. Laptops track Earth's shakes, rattles
and rolls. Nature. Vol 452(27):Page 397 March 2008.

Dominic-Luc Webb


From: Dominic-Luc Webb on 1 Apr 2008 06:05

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, microsys wrote:

> > Erik Vance. Laptops track Earth's shakes, rattles
> > and rolls. Nature. Vol 452(27):Page 397 March 2008.
> >
> > Dominic-Luc Webb
> >
> >
> An interesting application of the accelerometer concept can be seen at
> http://memento.ieor.berkeley.edu/index2.html


Thanks and exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping to stimulate.
There are other newsgroups where the geoscience can be more
appropriatelt discussed, but there are some computer issues for
the moment.

Accelerometers can be found quite cheap on Ebay. I note that
they typically have 3 axes. For comparison, that link you
offer shows motion without any spatial information. That is,
it does not indicate which of the 3 axes were affected. I
suspect it is showing only acceleration from a vector derived
from the 3 axes. Earthquakes can occur in all 3 axes, so it
should be more useful to fetch all three axes separately. This
is why I am interested in details of accessing the accelerometer
from Linux.

Dominic-Luc Webb

From: microsys on 1 Apr 2008 16:30
Dominic-Luc Webb wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, microsys wrote:
>
>>> Erik Vance. Laptops track Earth's shakes, rattles
>>> and rolls. Nature. Vol 452(27):Page 397 March 2008.
>>>
>>> Dominic-Luc Webb
>>>
>>>
>> An interesting application of the accelerometer concept can be seen at
>> http://memento.ieor.berkeley.edu/index2.html
>
>
> Thanks and exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping to stimulate.
> There are other newsgroups where the geoscience can be more
> appropriatelt discussed, but there are some computer issues for
> the moment.
>
> Accelerometers can be found quite cheap on Ebay. I note that
> they typically have 3 axes. For comparison, that link you
> offer shows motion without any spatial information. That is,
> it does not indicate which of the 3 axes were affected. I
> suspect it is showing only acceleration from a vector derived
> from the 3 axes. Earthquakes can occur in all 3 axes, so it
> should be more useful to fetch all three axes separately. This
> is why I am interested in details of accessing the accelerometer
> from Linux.
>
> Dominic-Luc Webb
>
I appreciate this subject may be off topic from Slackware however, from
an application standpoint it intrigues me. Having done in a hard drive
from excessive acceleration or was it the sudden stop that really did
the damage, my immediate reaction was an accelerometer would be a great
solution. I did a little research only to discover Apple has
incorporated such technology for a number of years. Linux in general, as
far as I know, has nothing similar.

Information about the device they use can be found here.
http://kionix.jimbuckleyjr.com/sensors/accelerometer-products.html

There are several app notes related to software interfacing which may be
useful. It seems to me, if you are willing to do a little hands on
hardware experimenting you may be able to get a sample from Kionix.
Might be worth investigating.
From: Damjan on 1 Apr 2008 20:33
> I did a little research only to discover Apple has
> incorporated such technology for a number of years. Linux in general, as
> far as I know, has nothing similar.

The hardware need to have it, of course. Thinkpads do have it, and it works
in Linux.

The hdaps driver (in vanilla kernel) for thinkpads has two interfaces: one
is direct reading from the sensor, the other is a joystick emulation.


--
damjan
From: marksouth on 2 Apr 2008 05:37
On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:30:07 -0700, microsys wrote:

> Having done in a hard drive
> from excessive acceleration or was it the sudden stop that really did
> the damage, my immediate reaction was an accelerometer would be a great
> solution. I did a little research only to discover Apple has
> incorporated such technology for a number of years. Linux in general, as
> far as I know, has nothing similar.

There are some tremendous applications for the accelerometer in a
portable. For example, see:

http://www.youtube.com/v/aBJQ5085kSo

I can't think of a better use for a Mac, myself.
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