Bug Vacuum

Where I live, we get these little gnats (fungus gnats - they resemble fruit flies) in the house in the Summer. They invade by the thousands and love to fly into your eyeballs - super annoying little bugs. This thing attracts and drowns them by the thousands.

The blue LED attracts them and they are sucked into soapy water by the little fan.

The fan makes no noise. The power supply is low current and only 5 Volts so is not an electrical hazard being near water or in the kitchen.

You need a wide mouth canning jar, a canning ring, a few electrical parts, some M2 screws and nuts, and these two 3D printed items. The electrical parts are available from Digi-Key or other electronics sellers (see the attached text file). You will need to do some simple soldering.

You will need a quantity of four M2 button head screws that are 16mm long and four M2 nuts to mount the fan.

To wire it, put the connector in place and tighten the nut securely, leaving the terminals on the top for easy soldering. Put the LED into the two tiny holes with the long wire toward the center. Cut the fan wires to about 5cm in length and strip and tin the ends of the red and black fan wires. Connect the short wire of the LED and the black wire (from the fan) to the outer (negative) post of the connector. Connect the long wire of the LED to the resistor, and solder this and trim it. Connect the other end of the resistor and the red wire (from the fan) to the inner (positive) post. The blue fan wire is not used. Apply power and test it. If the fan blows air up and the LED lights up, congratulations! Solder the connections and slide the cover in place until it snaps. Mount the fan with the screws after putting the cover in place or the cover will not slide on. Mount the fan with the M2 screws and nuts and with the label up.

If the LED does not light up, you likely have it backwards. The long leg is the positive one and the short leg is the negative one. If you put it in backwards, it won't hurt it if one end is hooked to the resistor – just reverse the leads and try again. If the fan blows down instead of up, you have the fan wires backwards. The connector has two terminals, one hooked to the center pin (positive) and the other hooked to the outer sleeve (negative).

Once it works, put some water into a wide mouth jar and add a few drops of dish soap and stir. Mount your 3D printed thing and screw it in place with a canning ring. Plug it in near where you see annoying flies and empty and refill it often.