Transcriber: Alma Ghita Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
My name is Rolf Hut.
I'm 30 years old and I'm a tinkerer.
I like to take things apart and see what makes them tick.
And then make them tick harder or faster
or make them do stuff they were never intended to do.
I like to hack my Wii and use it for measurements. I did.
But I also like to use some climbing rope and a champaign bucket
to take samples of the river Rhine
that we can analyze for medicine residue.
I am a tinkerer.
In the old days, you needed to have a lot of money
and a lot of time to be a tinkerer.
But today professor Meyer talked about democratization
and Tim Salmon already showed that that process
works in tinkering as well.
This is Tim's equipment.
It is 200 euros worth of stuff and he built a device
that can take pictures from the edge of space.
Go tell that to people 50 years ago.
Today everybody can be a tinkerer.
So you could be a tinkerer. I certainly am a tinkerer.
Most important for me, my students can be tinkerers.
In the projects that I supervise,
I encourage my students to just do stuff.
Go try something and build something.
One of these projects, for example,
is the Trans-African Hydro Meteorological Observatory.
This project is the brain child of three professors
with a lot of working experience in Africa.
They saw that a lot of the problems in Africa nowadays,
a lot, not all of them,
stem from the fact that there is not enough
accurate weather data measured on the ground.
And they realized that this will not change
in a world where weather stations cost
thousands and thousands of dollars.
So they came up with TAHMO.
A 200-dollar, no-moving-parts, low-cost,
no-maintenance, high-accuracy weather station.
For $200, you can, within a reasonable budget,
change this picture that you see right now,
which is the number of weather stations reporting to WMO,
and I'm pretty sure not all of them are functioning.
We could change that into this.
And maybe if we've done that then
the rest of the world wants to have those as well.
Luckily, they did not only think about the technical side of it.
They realized that for this to be a success,
it has to be embedded in the society,
so they thought they have to be at schools.
Schools are the center of the society.
So those stations will be deployed at schools,
they will form part of the curriculum,
and by being part of the society,
everybody in the society could benefit from it.
For example, farmers should have the opportunity to insure their crops.
It's a very natural thing for us that crops can be insured,
but an insurance company will only allow that
if there is accurate data on the ground.
Once you can insure your crops
you can start looking beyond a one-harvest horizon
and actually make improvements and investments
in your farm and in your life.
But bringing it closer to home, having better data,
gives you better weather forecast.
So that if you plan a nice family trip
that started under a blue sky,
you're at least warned that it may end like this.
I hated this, so did she.
(Laughter)
The first step that these three professors took
was to come to me.
They told me, they convinced me that the thing to get right,
absolutely necessary, to prove to the world
that this is a product and an idea worth spreading,
is to have a very good rain sensor.
So I went to one of my students, Kun Deika,
seen here soldering at the hotel floor in a Tanzanian hotel.
And I said to Kun, "Kun go forth and tinker me a prototype rain gauge thingie."
And he did. This is his first prototype.
What you see is just a piece of 30-cent piezo
stuck underneath a photo frame,
turning the glass into a microphone.
That in itself -- (hits device) --
can hear every drop impacting on it.
And Kun said to me: That's the basic principle.
Put some electronics behind it,
you got yourself a rain gauge.
Of course, we can't put that into a weather station.
It doesn't comply with the whole robust thing I just said.
So I went to another student, Stein Dion, and I said to him:
"Stein, go and engineer this and make this into a product."
And when we had that product, I went to another group of students,
Walter among them, and I said to him: Take this to Africa,
put it into a rainstorm and test it and see if it works.
And this is it.
This is our new rain gauge.
It listens to every drop that falls on it.
And you can hear it actually. (Tapping sounds)
And the electronics inside of this can detect all those drops.
And I show that by those flashes.
So, it works.
So, we just -- this is 10-dollars of stuff and 15-dollars of electronics.
It works, it actually works. (Tapping sounds)
(Sound of rain drops)
(Cheering) (Applause)
So by applying engineering to --
So we have a solution to one of the problems of Africa
that we made by using solar engineering
to something that started out as just a bit of tinkering.
So I ask all of you,
What big world problem will you solve tomorrow
by doing a bit of tinkering today?
Thank you.
(Applause)