Thinksaber - Turn your laptop into a lightsaber!

Main Idea

Thinksaber uses the Hard Drive Active Protection System available on IBM and Lenovo Thinkpad laptops to detect when the laptop is in motion and make an appropriately giggle-worthy Star Wars-like lightsaber sound effect. It was an attempt to teach myself some audio and PyGame interaction. This is the result. Warning: For all I know, this is a really bad thing to do to your hard drive, although I never saw any problems during testing. See the "NO WARRANTY GRANTED OR IMPLIED" line down below.

Acknowledgements

Thinksaber is obviously inspired by the program MacSaber, and I'm grateful to the MacSaber people for assembling the Star Wars sound effects collection needed to make it so successful.

Thinksaber uses a motion-detection algorithm derived from the one written by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa (miyagawa at gmail.com) for his own thinkpad-saber program, which ran only under Perl for Windows. Obviously, I think mine's better.

Requirements

Thinksaber runs under PyGame, a python-based gaming library, and should run on any IBM or Lenovo Thinkpad with PyGame installed. Under Linux, you may have to activate HDAPS and the joystick device.

Porting

Thinksaber should run under Windows, but I don't have a Microsoft Windows installation and so have no idea how to detect the accelerometer. Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's perl version is exclusively for MS Windows, so in theory porting it should be possible.

NO WARRANTY GRANTED OR IMPLIED

Copyright (C) 2008-2012 Elf M. Sternberg

Thinksaber is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

- Elf M. Sternberg <elf@pendorwright.com>