A commonly used light source is the Fluorescent Tube.  Unlike other models.. old school Fluorescent tubes need a starter and a ballast to get going and you may end up waiting for a while till it finally gives you some light. And besides they get pretty noise and flickery which is a bad problem.

Above you can see the various components that sit inside the Fluorescent tube.

How about eliminating the delay in start-up completely? One solution is to shift to an electronic ballast!

So I decided to crack open a CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lamp) and take out the electronic ballast inside..

NOTE: If your bulb for example is 10W then look for a CFL with around 10W electronic ballast.

And this is what it looks like when you crack open a CFL.  You can see clearly an electronic ballast sitting inside.  Using a soldering iron , heat the metal on top of the CFL to get the two mains wires loose. 

DO NOT simply cut the electronic ballast wires close to the PCB board since there is a resistor / inductor (haven't figured out which one it is yet) soldered to one of the mains wire..

Once you pull the ballast out you will notice 4 pins on the front side of the pcb ... two pins on the left and two on the right

(I bent the pins a little for soldering later on)

Now time to crack open the Fluorescent tube.

You can see the old school ballast inside .. I removed the starter and discarded it already

You will notice a pair of wires coming out at each tube socket .. Cut them close to the ballast and starter if needed.. 

The pair of wires coming from one tube socket is to be screwed into a connector. Repeat for other tube socket So that in the end you land up with 2 connectors close by.

NOTE: The pair of wire coming from one socket is not to be connected to the wires coming from the other socket.. These pairs need to be separate..  and each pair has to have its own connector

Solder 4 wires to the electronic ballast pins... the two pins on the left side of the ballast connects to any one of the connectors... the two pins on the right side of the electronic ballast connect to the remaining connector

In this picture, you can see two pink wires coming from the left 2 pins of the ballast and going to one connector.  And 2 brown wires coming from the right 2 pins are going to the remaining connector

Here is a schematic in case what I typed above made no sense.. 

Make sure that no wires are shorting.

Testing the ballast on the tube reveals that it works exactly like a CFL as expected..

Finally use some duct tape to wrap the tape all around the electronic ballast and make sure again that there are no shorts .. You really don't want the metal casing to go live? Do you ? 

Well that's it fellow hackers! I hope you enjoyed reading this and thanks alot for your interest.

Have fun!