Apple Motion Sensor Driver (ams)

What is ams ?

ams is a Linux kernel driver for the motion sensor found on post February 2005 Apple Alu Powerbooks and newer IBooks.

The programming specifications for this device were obtained by Johannes Berg by reverse enginneering the Mac OSX driver, and are available here. This driver is implemented using a clean room approach from the above specifications.

The ams driver is not complete yet. It does not do anything special (except printing a message) when a shock or a free fall is detected (the OSX driver parks the hard disk drives when this is happenning).

Usage:

Compile the driver and load the module.

In /sys/devices/ams you will find three files (x, y and z) which contain the sensor values for changes in each direction.

You can turn the ams driver into a mouse like input device by loading the module with the mouse option or at any time by writing 1 to /sys/devices/ams/mouse (writing 0 will disable the input device).

Links:

AMS reverse engineered specs
Some information about the AMS
Use the AMS as an input device (in OSX)

Download:
Filename	Size	Md5sum
ams-0.04.tar.bz2	4218 bytes	`2058eb5497732d890284704e25efa30c`
ams-0.03.tar.bz2	4230 bytes	`39d38e36fc2475fb9d24e372fd602aa0`
ams-0.02.tar.bz2	4228 bytes	`78a19fe490356a062cf025ceb2051cc2`
ams-0.01.tar.bz2	3688 bytes	`46849cdfeb5cf75bd6bd151fb3478c5c`

Stelian Pop

Last modified: Wed May 24 11:21:12 CEST 2006