Hacker News Reader

Comment by sweetjuly | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what your use case is for such a specific combo of sensors. Most of these devices are meant for use on standard consumer laptops (as in most other situations a regular mini microcontroller dev board is more than suitable), but I can't imagine wanting to shake my laptop and know the temperature ;)

View on HN

For one, it makes their sensor suite equal to what mobile phones have.

The IMU can be used alongside the camera for visual-inertial mapping and navigation, the barometer could be used for localization across floors of a building (yes the barometers in a phone are good enough to pick up on a couple meters' pressure difference), the IMU can also be used for shake-related gestures e.g. ignoring sporadic mouse movements when you're using a laptop in a car, they can be used for gestures e.g. slapping the laptop left and right to switch virtual workspaces, ...

If you were willing to have a chain or giant sandwich hanging off your laptop you could probably cobble that together with an Adafruit Trinkey and the sensors along the lines of this:

https://learn.adafruit.com/diy-trinkey-no-solder-air-quality...

(might not be too terrible velcro'ed to the lid...)

For devices like the Somu I could see it be useful for locking the device if a certain shock occurred. For example, someone snatched my laptop at the coffee shop. Something Ross Ulbricht probably wishes he would have had.

Sorry about your loss but where was this?

Is theft around public places like a coffee shop now a thing?

"Laptop snatched at Starbucks" is a security incident scenario people frequently plan for.

And it worked out REALLY bad for Ross.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com