[Will] wanted to build some animatronic eyes that didn’t require high-precision 3D printing. He wound up with a forgiving design that uses an Arduino and six servo motors. You can see the video of the eyes moving around in the video below.

The bill of materials is pretty simple and features an Arduino, a driver board, and a joystick. The 3D printing parts are easy to print with no supports, and will work with PLA. Other than opening up holes there wasn’t much post-processing required, though he did sand the actual eyeballs which sounds painful.

The result is a nice tight package to hold six motors, and the response time of the eye motion is very impressive. This would be great as part of a prop or even a robot in place of the conventional googly eyes.

While the joystick is nice, we’d like to see an ultrasonic sensor connected so the eyes track you as you walk across the room. Maybe they could be mounted behind an old portrait for next Halloween. Then again, perhaps a skull would be even better. If you want a refresher about servos, start with a laser turret tutorial.

Unless you have an incredibly well-stocked parts bin, it’s probably too late to build these spooky animated eyes to scare off the neighborhood kiddies this year. But next year…

It’s pretty clear that Halloween decorating has gone over the top recently. It may not be as extreme as some Christmas displays, but plenty of folks like to up the scare-factor, and [wermy] seems to number himself among those with the spirit of the season. Like Christmas lights, these eyes are deployed as a string, but rather than just blink lights, they blink creepy eyes from various kinds of creatures. The eyes are displayed on individual backlit TFT-LCD displays housed in 3D-printed enclosures. Two pairs of eyes can be driven by the SPI interface of one ItsyBitsy M0 Express; driving more displays works, but the frame rate drops to an unacceptable level if you stretch it too far. Strung together on scraps of black ethernet cable, the peepers can live in the shrubs next to the front door or lining the walk, and with surprisingly modest power needs, you’ll get a full night of frights from a USB battery bank.

We like the look of these, and maybe we’ll do something about it next year. If you’re still in the mood to scare and don’t have the time for animated eyes this year, try these simple Arduino blinky eyes for a quick hit.

Thanks to [baldpower] for the treat. No tricks.

Halloween is a great holiday for hacks, bringing out the creativity in even the most curmudgeonly wielder of a soldering iron. [tdragger] was looking to have some good old fashioned Halloween fun, and got to thinking – putting together this great Spooky Eyes build in their attic window.

The effect itself is simple – just two glowing orange LEDs spaced the right distance apart, placed in the highest window in the house. As every young child knows, the attic is almost the spookiest room in the house, second only to the basement.

Various effects were programmed in to the Arduino running the show, like breathing and blinking effects, to give that frightful character. For maintenance and programming purposes, [tdragger] wanted to have the Arduino remotely mounted, and searched for a solution. Rather than leaning on a wireless setup or something modern and off-the-shelf, instead some old RJ11 telephone extension cables were pressed into service. These allowed the eyes to be placed in the window, allowing the Arduino to be placed in a more accessible location.

It’s a basic project, but one that has a good fun factor. Sometimes it’s good to use what you’ve got to hand, so that the buzz of enjoyment isn’t dampened by the long wait for shipping. For something bigger, check out this giant staring eyeball.

Animatronics for movies is often about making something that works and is reliable in the short term. It doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t have to last forever. [Corporate Sellout]  shows us the minimalist approach to building animatronics with this pair of special eyes.  These eyes move in both the pan and tilt. Usually, that means a gimbal style mount. Not in this case. The mechanical assembly consists of with popsicle sticks, ping-pong balls, film canisters and dental floss.

The frame for the eyes is made of simple popsicle sticks hot glued together. The eyes themselves are simple ping-pong balls. Arduino powered servos control the movement. The servos are connected to dental floss in a cable arrangement known as a pull-pull system. As each servo moves, one side of the arm pulls on a cable, while the other provides enough slack for the ping-pong ball to move.

Mounting the ping-pong balls is the genius part of this build. They simply sit in the open end of a couple of film canisters. the tension from the dental floss holds everything together. We’re sure it was a finicky setup to build, but once working, it’s reliable. Only a glue joint failure or stretch in the dental floss could cause issues.

There are plenty of approaches to Animatronic eyes. Check out the eyes in this Stargate Horus helmet, which just won our Sci-Fi contest. More recently we saw Gawkerbot, which uses a CD-ROM drive to provide motion for a creepy robot’s eyes.

Turn an old headlamp into a power assist for your eyebrows. Use an infrared remote control to raise, lower, waggle, and adjust.

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The post Strap a Robot to Your Face! Your Expressions Are Now Controlled by Technology appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

If you’re looking to build the next creepy Halloween decoration or simply thinking about trying out OpenCV for the first time, this next project will have you covered. [Glen] made a pair of giant googly eyes that follow you around the room using some servos and some very powerful software.

The project was documented in three parts. In Part 1, [Glen] models and builds the eyes themselves, including installing the servo motors that will eventually move them around. The second part involves an Arduino and power supply that will control the servos, and the third part goes over using OpenCV to track faces.

This part of the project is arguably the most interesting if you’re new to OpenCV; [Glen] uses this software package to recognize different faces. From there, the computer picks out the most prominent face and sends commands to the Arduino to move the eyes to the appropriate position. The project goes into great detail, from Arduino code to installing Ubuntu to running OpenCV for the first time!

We’ve featured some of [Glen]’s projects before, like his FPGA-driven LED wall, and it’s good to see he’s still making great things!

This is just one example of several pairs of spooky eyes which light up [Vato Supreme's] bushes this Halloween. The quick and inexpensive build process make it a perfect diy decoration.

Each eye is made up of a ping-pong ball and an LED. But that alone won’t be very spook as the entire ball will glow rather brightly. So he spiced things up a bit by masking off the shape of a pupil and spraying the balls black. The vertical slit seen in white above will glow red like a demon in the night.

The LEDs are driven by an ATtiny85 running the Arduino bootloader. [Vato] found there was plenty of space two write code which fades the eyes in and out using PWM. This happens at random intervals for each of the four pairs he is driving.

We’ve seen a similar project that used oversized LEDs as the eyes. But we really like the idea of using a diffuser like this one. See it in action after the break.