How to hack your home: why there’s never been a better time to tinker
As presenter of this year’s Christmas lectures, Professor Danielle George wants us to ‘hack our homes’. Here she explains why hacking – as in tinkering with technology, not sabotaging it – has become a key skill for today’s children
Bright ideas: Professor Danielle George. Photograph: Paul Wilkinson
Sunday 14 December 2014 07.00 GMT
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Hacking. It’s a word commonly associated with murky rooms, nefarious characters and attempts to steal data. So when the Royal Institutionannounced that this year’s Christmas lectures will be titled “How to Hack Your Home”, it seemed almost an act of establishment rebellion.
But it wasn’t. Because hacking has taken on a new identity – grown a Dr Jekyll to counter its Mr Hyde. “Hack” is now the byword for smart fixes and canny contraptions, from home-crafted alarm systems to remotely operated kettles which, 20 years ago, could only have been dreamed up by Wallace and Gromit and suffixed with “o-matic”. And for the University of Manchester’s Professor Danielle George, who will be taking to the stage this year, the Christmas lectures are the perfect opportunity to peel off the sinister-activites label and replace it with a fantastic-benefits one. “[Hacking] is not all illegally entering databases at the Pentagon,” she explains when we meet in the rarified surroundings of the Royal Institution. “It’s something positive, something we should actually encourage people to do, especially children.”
That electronics should be at the heart of the Christmas lectures seems somehow fitting given that they were kicked off in 1825 by Michael Faraday – the intellectual maverick who put forward the principle of electromagnetic induction. And there’s no doubt that he was keen on tinkering – among his myriad inventions is the electric dynamo.
George’s own research is in radio frequency and microwave communications and the devices she develops have contributed to projects that even Faraday couldn’t have dreamed of – the enormous Square Kilometer Array among them. When construction is finished on its two sites in Australia and South Africa it will be the largest radio telescope on Earth. George’s instruments form part of the receivers and enable very weak signals, picked up from space, to be amplified. “What you don’t want to do is add any more noise to the signal that you are receiving,” she says. “The amplifiers I design are termed ‘low-noise amplifiers’, so we’re trying to reduce the amount of noise that comes from the receiver itself.”
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For George the fascination with the way things work began young; as a child she enjoyed prising apart mechanical and electrical goods and alarmed her sisters by “pulling the wings off a fly and putting it under the microscope and just seeing how the wings worked” – the fly, she hastens to tell me, was already dead. Her first degree was in astrophysics; she followed that with an MSc in radio astronomy and then a PhD in electrical and electronic engineering.
But while investigating the innards of electrical goods and constructing her own is all in a day’s work for George, the emergence of a new wave of sleek consumer tech, she says, has made it more difficult for today’s youngsters to follow that sort of experimental, empirical path into science. “Many people now just look at phones, or smartphones or tablets as black boxes,” she says. “They just work.” If the device malfunctions it seems easier to get a new one than try to open it up to have a stab at fixing it.
But the age of the tinkerer might just have returned. Mini-computers such as the Raspberry Pi or micro-controllers like the Arduino platform are inspiring a new generation to get to grips with electronics, to try out new ideas and build a host of devices. “I’ve certainly seen a difference – the students who come into the university now have started to do a lot more tinkering,” says George. Not, that they’d call it that.
She, too, has been using the technology to create hacks for her own home. “We started using the Raspberry Pi or Arduino-type platforms just to set up a little webcam so that we could see the garden,” she says. “It triggers if foxes or whatever are coming across the garden.” And with her first child on the way, there are other plans afoot. “We’ve been playing around with a few ideas about what we might put in the nursery from a safety point of view – and also from a music point of view.” It’s an approach that can lead to all manner of devices, including homemade smart meters to keep tabs on the energy consumption of a host of household goods, and to tweak how and when they operate. And they don’t have to involve programming – making your fairy lights twinkle to music is a simple yet ingenious hack with not a Pi in sight.
Of course the Christmas lectures are more ambitious than that. “We’re going to take a light bulb, a telephone and a motor and then say: where can these take us?” she says. “[With] the light bulb, for example, we want to make sure people understand the technology in terms of LEDs and where it is going, and possibly even communicating with LEDs these days, but then do something really large-scale – so could we, for example, play a Tetris-style game on the side of a skyscraper?”
This approach looks bound to capture the imagination of young inventors, but George wants to go further – she wants to see us all getting to grips with crocodile clips in their own homes.
“It’s really strange that people have the confidence to do things like baking – you could be a terrible cook or baker and you still might say, ‘Oh, I’ll give it a go, there’s a new recipe in whatever magazine.’ People should have the same attitude to electronics.”
The reason that this have-a-go spirit doesn’t extend to electronic or computer tinkering comes back to public perception, she believes, and the subtle messages that seep through to children – the drip, drip, drip of negative attitudes towards science and maths. “It boils my blood when you hear it on TV or you hear parents saying that,” she fumes. “You’re making it into this big thing so our children think maths is really difficult. Maths might come extremely naturally to people and history could be really difficult, or learning a language could be really difficult. It’s just what interests you, what enthuses you, but if we drum it out of them by almost telling them that [maths] is difficult it really doesn’t help.”
How to encourage children, especially girls, to pursue a career in science is a topic of intense debate, fuelled by shocking statistics. Only 20% of A-level physics candidates are girls – with deep-rooted stereotypes, a lack of role models and uninspiring lesson styles among the factors often cited as stifling interest. The dearth of women in the field is something George has been keenly aware of since her student days. “At one point I was the only girl in my class and then at work I was one of only two female engineers,” she says. “Now in the university, in the school of electrical and electronic engineering, out of a staff of 70 staff there are five or six females.”
If we’re to make it clear to kids that both boys and girls can aspire to the same scientific career, we need to take action while they are young: “We need to go back into primary schools and get across the message that there is no difference between little Polly and little Fred – they can both do exactly what they want to do.”
One field that seems perennially to capture the imagination of children and adults alike, whatever their gender, is space science. The recent success of the Rosetta mission, in which scientists managed to deposit a lander on the surface of a comet as it hurtled along at 135,000 kilometers per hour, stole headlines the world over and sparked a wave of excitement that spread from mission control to offices and schoolrooms. It’s a phenomenon that many, including Professor Brian Cox, are keen to harness. “The next question [for schoolchildren] is: is it possible for me to do this?” Cox said in a recent interview.
George believes the Rosetta mission shows what a dose of electronics is capable of. “This space probe has managed to land on the comet, has taken data from [it] and the data is being sent back,” she says. “It is just phenomenal, the data rates you are talking about, but also the distance of communication.” And while those wielding a soldering iron at home are unlikely to rival the European Space Agency, that doesn’t mean they can’t use a little engineering to explore the solar system. “You could take the same principle and use the satellite dish that you have outside your house and use it to observe the sun or observe the moon. That is actually quite simple,” George says. When it comes to hacking, it seems, even the sky isn’t a limit.
Try hacking your own home (children with adult supervision) with these tricks from the Royal Institution:
Illustration by Pete Guest.1. The macro lens for your mobile
Experiment with closeups thanks to this eye-opening hack
What you’ll need
A smartphone with a camera
A disposable camera
A screwdriver or chisel
Scissors
A charity rubber wristband
Method
1 Use the screwdriver or chisel to prise open the disposable camera – if the camera has a flash beware of the capacitor as it could give you a mild shock if you touch it.
2 Find the square of plastic on the front of the camera – this contains a small plastic lens. Use the chisel or screwdriver to remove to plastic and then set the lens aside.
3 Take a wristband and fold it in half. At the bend use the scissors to cut a small circular hole.
4 Take the lens and pop it flat-side down on top of the smartphone camera lens. Manoeuvre the wristband over the smartphone to hold the lens in place, aligning the small hole with the lens.
5 Turn off the smartphone’s autofocus function and you are set to snap! For best results get up-close to your subject (approx 2-3cm away).
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Illustration by Pete Guest.
2. The synchronised Christmas lights
Get set for the festive season with this bright idea
What you’ll need
A TIP31c transistor (can be purchased online or from electronics shops)
A set of battery-powered fairy lights
An audio jack (can be purchased online or from electronics shops)
Short lengths of thin wire
Electrical tape
Audio splitter – optional (can be purchased online or from electronics shops)
Note: if the audio jack is not already wired, carefully unscrew it and attach a length of wire to the longer prong (the ground) and another length to either the left or right prong. Then screw the casing back on.
Method
1 Remove the batteries from the battery pack of the fairy lights.
2 Look at the battery pack. Work out which is the negative wire (the one attached to the terminal with a spring) and which is the positive wire (the other one).
3 Cut the wire protruding from the negative terminal of the battery pack (leaving a length of wire still attached), and strip away some of the plastic coating.
4 Twist this wire around the central pin of the transistor and cover it in a little electrical tape.
5 Strip a little plastic from the length of wire still attached to the negative terminal of the battery pack – twist this around the right-hand pin of the transistor and cover it with tape.
6 Connect the ground wire of the audio jack (the wire attached to its longer prong) to the right-hand pin of the resistor, again cover in a little electrical tape.
7 Connect the wire from either the left or right terminal of the audio jack to the left-hand pin of the transistor and secure with electrical tape.
8 Pop the batteries back into the pack.
9 Plug the audio jack into your laptop or computer and click “play music” on screen – you might need to ramp up the volume to see an effect.
10 To get the full effect, either play the same tune on another device or use an audio splitter: plug the hacked audio jack into one of its sockets and the jack of an additional speaker into the other.
What’s going on?
In this hack, the transistor is acting like a switch – when a current with a large enough voltage arrives from the jack the transistor “switches on”, allowing the larger current from the battery pack to flow and the lights to glow.
Illustration by Pete Guest.3. The crisp-packet stylus
Lost the stylus for your tablet? Don’t worry, you can knock up a new one in your lunchbreak
What you’ll need
A piece of paper
A blunt pencil
Scissors
A crisp packet with a metallic lining
Sticky tape
Method
1 Eat the crisps and then give the inside of the packet a wipe to remove crumbs.
2 Cut a 5cm x 5cm square out of the crisp packet.
3 Cut a 2.5cm x 2.5cm square out of paper.
4 Fold the square of paper in half and half again, to form a smaller square, then fold this in half diagonally to form a triangle.
5 Insert the tip of the pencil into first fold of the triangle so that the paper forms a cone over the end of the pencil.
6 Place the tip of the cone-covered pencil into the centre of the crisp packet square. Bunch up the crisp packet and tape it around the top to secure the crisp packet to the pencil.
7 Your homemade stylus can now be used on any touchscreen device – just make sure your fingers are touching the crisp-packet layer.
What’s going on?
Modern touchscreens don’t respond to pressure, they respond to changes in capacitance (a capacitor is essentially two conductive plates that can hold charge, separated by an insulator). Since your body conducts electricity, prodding the smartphone screen with your finger affects the electrostatic field at that point. For a stylus to work on such a device, it must conduct electricity from the body to the screen – hence the need for the metallic crisp packet.
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