DIY animatronic eyes – cute and spooky

Have a little bit of spare time this coming weekend, and want to find something productive to do? Well, why not check out what Chris at PyroElectro has in store for you via his tutorial on building your own pair of animatronic eyes that are certain to enthrall whoever that lay their eyes on it when they step into your humble abode?

One of the holy grails in animatronics is a realistic robotic eye because eyes are one of the hardest facial features to duplicate with realistic quality. While I have no intention of building the perfect animatronic eye in this tutorial, the low cost and convincing illusion created is rather remarkable.

This tutorial will present a single method for controlling 2-axis of robotic eye movement using an improvised gimbal system. This will give us control for the animatronic eye to move up and down as well as left and right, just like a human’s eye. Four micro Servo Motors will be used to actuate these movements in the eye.

What are you waiting for? The video of this DIY animatronic eyes are available in the extended post if you’re curious to see what the final product is like. Chris has rated this project to be of medium difficulty, taking around 5 hours on average to complete.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: DYI, Mod, Robot, Robotics, Robots