Team #Mosquit at #UH22

Well, the Team?#uh22 hackathon is wrap. Team #mosquit did a GREAT job getting our gamified mosquito killer working! We all learned a lot about how these devices work and what sort of hacks you can create around them! We spent time taking apart:

and understanding the circuits in a bug zapper and how to tap into them and then how to step down the voltage drops to work with the VERY sensitive Arduino boards.

4 Arduino boards, one RGB screen and much re-engineering later, we were able to demonstrate how the electrical circuit can generate data about when an object hits the powered screen:

A second workstream was to mount a RGB array behind the killing screen to see if we could attract more mosquitos with different colours. After a minor cooking incident, we were able to get a donated colored LED strip installed and working for this process:

Data about which colors were being displayed was sent along with the "zap count" data to an MQTT host for processing.

There were some other features that we wanted to implement, such as playing sounds when a mosquito was fried, but the hardware was just too fickle to plumb into the project... that's life on a hackathon!

We also had to design a holder for all of the pieces that would be both functional and attractive!

At the end of the event we won the "Danger Zone" prize, for dealing with dangerous insects AND high voltages... all in a cool package with killer graphics and design!

Thanks so much to my great team:

Markus Katzenhofer , Rahil Mujadidi , Zuzana Tulip and Ammar Rmesh and of course Dirk Thomschke , our Project Manager! Also thanks to EBCONT for their generous support and letting us play for a day!