A warm-night nuisance is getting an upgrade: developer Nicolas Boichat built a passive bug zapper that counts the “kills” by detecting the electrical event when a bug is caught. The system uses a loop antenna, an ESP32-C6 for voltage spike detection, and a das
On a warm, humid night, bugs don’t just show up—they take over. So Nicolas Boichat decided a passive bug zapper wasn’t fancy enough. Instead of letting the zapper’s success be measured only by how quiet the room feels afterward, he built one that tracks its kill count.
The core idea is surprisingly tactile: detect the moment a bug gets zapped. When a bug is caught, it arcs and produces an electromagnetic pulse. A small loop antenna on the backside of the zapper receives that pulse, giving the device something concrete to listen for.
Boichat’s prototype wraps that sensing into the actual hardware. The final PCB is attached to the bug zapper. and the detection doesn’t stay in the “it seems to work” category for long. The project was also framed as an experiment in how well he could lean into “vibe-EE”—and the results were mixed. Claude could correctly identify basic concepts of electrical engineering needed for the build. but it was largely worthless at making schematics. After that, Boichat moved on to manual circuit doodling, then built the circuit himself.
For the real detection work, the zapper uses an ESP32-C6 to detect the voltage spikes created by the arcing. Once the device can measure what’s happening. it creates a natural problem to solve: what do you do with all that data?. The answer is a dashboard. Boichat used existing graphing libraries and a custom PCB to build a way to visualize the results—turning a passive bug zapper into something closer to a tiny environmental monitor with an unexpectedly blunt metric.
The project continues a theme he’s explored before. MISRYOUM has covered a similar idea in the past—one based on current sensing—showing that this kind of “measure the kill” approach keeps finding its way back to the same question: how do you reliably translate zap events into numbers?
bug zapper ESP32-C6 passive bug zapper kill count tracking loop antenna voltage spikes dashboard PCB electromagnetic pulse electronics project