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Saturday, 23 May 2026

Passive Bug Zapper Tracks Its Kill Count

If it’s summer in a warm, humid climate, bugs can be the bane of your existence. A natural solution is to place a passive bug zapper to catch bugs at night. But what if that isn’t fancy enough? [Nicolas Boichat] spices it up with a passive bug zapper that tracks its kill count.

But how exactly do you detect a bug zap? With an antenna, of course! When a bug gets caught, it arcs, creating an electromagnetic pulse. A small loop antenna on the backside of the zapper receives the signal.

The final PCB, attached to the bug zapper.

It was also in part an experiment to see how good you can “vibe-EE” and, well, mixed results. Claude was able to correctly identify basic concepts of EE needed here, but was largely worthless at making schematics. After some manual circuit doodling, then building, [Nicolas] successfully got an ESP32-C6 to detect the voltage spikes.

Of course, where there’s data, there must be a dashboard. Using existing graphing libraries and a custom PCB, [Nicolas] has the ultimate bug zapping experience.

We’ve covered a similar idea in the past, namely one based on current sensing.



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