After all, the current state of my notebook could be considered as ‘usable’ but not ‘fully working’, due to some components that still are unused or not configured. While looking at the components I stumbled over the hdaps thingy which should save your harddisk from headcrashes.

As the whole Thinkpad is more or less a special thing on its own, I started crawling the portage and found app-laptop/tp_smapi and app-laptop/hdapsd – two packages that should do the trick. But sadly they were out of date, so we had to write our own overlays which can be found in our own overlay. After some compilework, the kernel modules and daemons are ready. Regarding the module thinkpad_ec it might be necessary to convince it to work using the module parameter “force_io=1”.

The kernel log proves success:

hdaps: initial mode latch is 0x05
hdaps: setting ec_rate=250, filter_order=2
hdaps: device successfully initialized.
input: ThinkPad HDAPS joystick emulation as /devices/virtual/input/input15
input: ThinkPad HDAPS accelerometer data as /devices/virtual/input/input16
hdaps: driver successfully loaded.

The result is a working hdapsD which now protects the harddisk and a new way of abusing the notebook as the sensor reports the notebook position as joystick movements, which is more or less a funny side effect that can be abused for some fun…