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Experimenting With Light on Apple Laptops
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?"
Lights Out
-tgpo
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.
This space for rent.
...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 users, hop to it, 'Think Different', and make Slashdot's front page.
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 touchpad that made the laptop unusable. But that hard drive wsa safe
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 outer space.
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Q
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.