What's inside this cheap insect zapper 

Totally agree. Thank you Diode Gone Wild.

@@oddjobbob8742 yea 🙌

I came watching his cat, his cat always has good ideas about electronics 😃😸

I choked on my coffee with this comment! Cheers! 😂

True!!

@@bluesteelbass Thanks for letting me know! I’m glad I wasn’t drinking mine when I read your comment. 😂

Damn, that was funny mate! 😄

Tea spiting everywhere 🤣

Same, stick it on the mains, photonicinduction style

Connect it directly on both ends without the resistance of the coating…

Yes, the capacitive current via the glass helps the ignition. Well, there is a possibility the electrode was intentionally installed like this, but I still think it's a defect... I'd have to buy another to compare it. I guess they put more mercury in it than needed, some evaporates and the excess just stays liquid.

I think the anode cap doubles as a "getter". They put a mercury in an absorptive and conductive material (like water in a sponge). After assembly the evacuate the glass. By using an RF coil near the getter it heats up and boils off mercury.

@@therealjammit Normally the dose is an amalgam of mercury with copper powder, put a drop in the tube, and then on first test in the factory it will boil off a tiny amount of mercury, and continue to do so for the life of the tube. No need to RF heat it or provide a getter, the tube is gas filled, so just has to be kept hot during pump down, easy on a production line, where the large wheel has the tube going through all processes one after the other, with sealing being the final stage. Amalgam and gas fill takes place after pump down and bake, so the gas pressure in the tube is right, and the heat also activates the amalgam to put a little mercury in the gas, so has to be done right before gas fill and sealing. Hard vacuum tubes need a getter, but here you actually want a soft tube. Getters do not work on soft tubes, especially mercury filled ones, they would be useless within hours from mercury poisoning.

The coating indeed has three functions: A starting aid, electrode connection and a ballasting spike limitting resistor all at once.

ya ive been seeing more clever ITO products out of china lately like those cheap geiger tubes. instead of using an expensive metal to make a radiotranslucent cylender they will take a thin glass tube and coat it with ITO. not as good but orders of magnitude cheaper

I think no UVC just because the glass that would pass UVC is more expensive than glass that blocks it.

Perfect for those bugs from that Space Marines movie lol

what is working volt for the Tube. Ac or Dc ? Not avail near shops. can we use LED Blue strips insted of this tube.?

@@babythomas2902 My insect trap has an E14 socket installed. There is mains voltage: 230 volts and 50 hertz, i.e. alternating current AC (or maybe with reduced voltage because of the capacitive dropper like in the video, but my LED seems to light up normally). So you can use any small lamp with an E14 base and the appropriate voltage as a replacement for the fluorescent tube. LED strips should be possible if you can operate them on 230 volts AC and connect the contacts yourself. There are also electric insect traps with fluorescent tubes that have two pins at each end. These are connected to fluorescent tube start electronics and are therefore probably not suitable for LED lamps without modification.

This doesn't have anything with the gas tight seal. In only equalizes the pressure in the section outside the sealed tube or bulb.

Yes, I'd use 1000V, but I've even seen 400V capacitors used for the same purpose...

well, you may be right. Maybe the base is just a leftover from a tungsten lamp production...

The reason is for smoother DC output and minimizing flicker. Notice that the bridge rectifier is often a part of a buck regulator. Yes it's true that LEDs are diodes but running them on AC without rectification would cause flicker. Cheaper bulbs often only have half wave rectifier or none at all and it flickers like hell at mains frequency

It would never draw 15W with a 47nF capacitor in series.

@@DiodeGoneWild hmmm true forgot that. Still curious whether it would draw 15w connected direct to mains if it wasn't broken

@@DiodeGoneWild Probably meant to have a 680n capacitor instead of 47n, but they ran out of the 680n capacitors. Fuse likely is recycled ewaste, probably cheaper than a wire jumper.

Using a virtual ground

It's probably just UVA, not UVC. Most materials block UVC. You actually have to use special and more expensive glass in a UVC lamp to pass the UVC.

For the most part, yes you could measure it with some LED arrays , one with glass and one without - though you'd have to use blue SMD LEDs, theoretically if there's a significant portion of UVC hitting the arrays, the 'unshielded' set should show a somewhat higher output current. Using a differential amplifier you can observe this voltage difference, and feed it to a meter or whatnot... ...If you only needed light intensity readings UVA and under, a typical amorphous panel from a garden light will suffice!

The zap from the capacitor would only go through couple mm of your skin, not your heart. But you're still touching mains via a 10k resistor, this would pass up to 23mA through your body if you're grounded.

It’s much better from the perspective of a fly.

This is nothing but a cheap Chinese zapper with a Czech manual, resold at 100x the price by an unnamed supermarket.

this one is not true RMS. It's old, from about 2002.

@@DiodeGoneWild 15:45 But here you used one