HOW TO...
Use your smartphone to help with DIY
by Nik Rawlinson
What you need: iPhone or Android phone Time required: Probably a whole weekend
Spring is upon us, and now that we can throw open the windows to get rid of dust and fresh paint fumes, it’s the perfect time to start thinking about home improvements. But have you got the right tools for the job? Take a trip to your local DIY store and, if you’re not careful, you can end up spending hundreds of pounds on tape measures, wall-stud detectors, plumb lines and the wrong coloured paint (we’ve all done it). A cheaper alternative is to delegate some of these tasks to your phone.With a camera, accelerometer and magnetometer, your phone is an all-in-one tradesperson’s buddy, and a far more versatile DIY sidekick than you probably imagined. Here we’ll reveal how your smartphone – whether Android or iPhone – can help you do a neater home-improvement job more quickly.
1 Measure distances and dimensions
If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can do away with a physical tape measure by using the built-in Measure app instead – as long as you don’t need to be millimetre perfect (if you’ve uninstalled Measure, you can reinstall it from the App Store at www.snipca.com/54453). You’ll need to be using an iPhone SE or later, iPhone 6s or later, an iPad Pro, or an iPad 5th Generation or later. And if you have an iPhone Pro, you’ll also benefit from the built-in LiDAR scanner, which detects objects to automatically apply measurements.
When you launch the app, you’ll see a broken circle on the screen. Line up the dot at the centre of this with one of the extremities of the object you want to measure and press the ‘+’ (plus) button (see screenshot) to add a vector. Now move your iPhone or iPad to frame the opposite end of the dimension you want to measure and press the ‘+’ button again.