toshiba-tablet team mailing list archive

[Bulat <bulatkjug@xxxxxxx>]

> >> You can also use 3D accelerometer to automatically detect your tablet
> >> orientation and rotate screen as you go rotating your tablet, and it
> >> will go round and round. :)  There is a description of how to do this
> >> for IBM X41 in another bug-report on the launchpad.  I suppose, that one
> >> can manage to do this for M7 also (maybe some digging on the internet
> >> will be needed).
> 
> I always thought that the accelerometer on the toshiba tablets is 
> different from the one on the IBMs, and in particular the toshiba one is 
> unsupported under linux. If I am wrong, we should prepare a package 
> which automatises accelerometer support - and a startup session script 
> that rotates the tablet automatically - and maybe some cool cube 
> rotation under compiz :) That'd be probably easy and fun to do.

Accelerometer devices are usually connected via I2C or SPI interface.

I've found, that:
Some of Toshiba laptops use LIS3LO2AQ STMicroelectronics chip for an
accelerometer (it's relatively modern 3D chip).
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/116045

Older ones (year 2004 - Portege 200/205) used 2D accelerometer from
Analog Devices (ADXL311).
http://www.technologyquestions.com/technology/tablet-pc-press-releases/502-toshiba-selects-analog-devices-imems-accelerometer.html

There is a patch for Linux kernel that adds LIS3LO2DQ support via SPI.
(not LIS3LO2AQ, but still - it is one family of products, so maybe their
protocols are compliant)
http://osdir.com/ml/linux.kernel.spi.devel/2008-07/msg00071.html

SPI is supported starting from 2.6.24 Linux kernels.
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_24

>From industrialio documentation:
The industrial IO subsystem provides a unified framework for drivers
for many different types of embedded sensors using a number of
different phyiscal interfaces (i2c, spi etc). See
Documentation/industrialio for more information.

There've been a proposed patch for industrialio core with a lot of
defined constants described as
/* Accelerometer types of attribute */
http://osdir.com/ml/linux.kernel.spi.devel/2008-07/msg00070.html

Bye.
Went discovering more on industrialio subsystem of Linux kernel. :)