These 3D-printed animatronic eyes are the perfect spooky addition for your next build

We’ve covered a few projects that use eyeballs for creepy effects. For instance, we saw this large eyeball that can speak to you and this portrait that watches you wherever you walk. While these projects are a ton of fun, they may be a little difficult to apply to a bespoke project that you’re working on.

That’s not the case with these special animatronic eyes. Their very design allows them to add them to pretty much whatever you need a pair of eyes on, from toys to robots. Best of all, you can 3D print a lot of it, making it a very cool, DIY way to add an unsettling aura to whatever you please.

Build your own eyes with this 3D-printable project

In a post on Instructables, tinkerer Ikkalebob showed off their new project. It’s a pair of animatronic eyes that combines a 3D-printed shell, some motors, some (hopefully) fake eyeballs, and a controller board. In fact, here’s the bill of materials:

6x Micro servos, choose either:

• SG90 – Low-cost, easy to find, but weaker and slower
• MG90s – A great middle-ground between cost and power

Note that several other types of servo with similar form factors may also be compatible with the mechanisms, but not all have been tested at this time

2x Realistic Eyeballs, choose either:

1x Eye Mechanism Controller Board

Ikkalebob notes that you can swap out the eye mechanism controller board with a Raspberry Pi Pico with “a breadboard, jumper cables and a two-way switch,” but using specialist hardware for the job may provide better results in the long run.

The Instructables page linked above contains all the instructions you need to make your own pair. As it turns out, the eyes can be set to either look around randomly or can be controlled manually, which sounds really useful for fitting different kinds of projects. And given how we’re still quite a ways from Halloween, now might be the perfect time to get something on the workbench to really spook the trick-or-treaters this year.