Many animals are not as publicly disgusting as mosquitoes, they are the innocent kind that, at worst, miss you the winter, or more serious animals that can be a real threat to your health. A satisfying way to deal with them is to use one of those racket-shaped high voltage metal mesh bug zappers to say goodbye to them with a bang. [lmu34] Sees great potential for some extra gamification here and decides to equip its zipper with kill counter and matching sound effects.
The initial thought was that there must be a way to detect when a mosquito hits the net and use it to cause further events – [lmu34]Case plays a sound file and adds a counter. After doing some research on isolating the zipper, he put the theory into practice using a Digispark Pro board with an ATtiny167, a DFPlayer module to run a set of WAV files, and an ambitious four-digit 7-segment display to keep track. A new 3d-printed cover provided enough space to hold all components, including a charging circuit, as it replaced the original two AAA batteries with a rechargeable one, giving the display a bit more power.
Of course, with these operation voltages, it will be difficult to detect more than one activity at high voltage, so [lmu34] Went with current sensing instead. He distinguished between two different levels here and mapped them as Normal killing And Kill the monster Playing different words for each of the big zaps, respectively. Watch the video after the break for a quick look.
All in all, this is a pleasantly unreasonable change that almost screams for an ESP32 to enable multiplayer mode as the next iteration. But if repelling mosquitoes with low-tech gadgets isn’t for you, there’s always laser and good old-fashioned torture, though they can’t be recreated to inject some hardware faults in the winter months.