My DIY projects out there for the curious souls to see.

      About a year ago now I tore down my old lab with the plans to rebuild it into something bigger and better. And today when cleaning up I found my old LED overhead light that I used to light up my workbench. When I looked at the LED modules I noticed something strange and decided to write a blog post about it.  The strange thing I've noticed is what I assume is aging of the phosphorus gel used to convert the blue light from the LED chips to something more eye-friendly.     The first picture below is one of an LED module that failed early (how typical of these COB's) and you can see that there's a little black halo around each of the LED chips but nothing more.      Second picture is of an LED module that lasted much longer and you can see how the phosphorus has darkened and it almost looks like it has become more translucent. Also the dark area around each of the LED modules is much darker and bigger.      In the third pict...

      It has been a while since my bug zapper was deployed and many things have happened since. So here I will share what sort of stuff I've tried with the zapper to make it more effective and what I've found out in the process.     When I first put the zapper up I had to figure out how to bait the flies into the trap, but what do I use? First idea was to use a solar powered garden light as could be seen in the original post. This didn't really work that well and bugs weren't really inretested in the light emitted by the LED. So I had to come up with something better. Since the horse flies love meat I thought I'd put a piece of sausage on a plate and place it inside the zapper. This also didn't work so as a last ditch effort, and since I knew horse flies are also attracted to CO2, I put some yeast along with the sausage and poured a little water to moisten the bait up. And guess what? It still caught nothing. Well at least my shed smelled of bread now. At this p...