Animatronic Eyes
modelling and moving a single lever
This project started because I was curious about working with joints and mechanisms in Fusion360.
As a first experiment, I drew and printed this simple lever:
After that, I used the same mechanism to move an eyeball in one dimension:
And this is how that looked once printed:
Adding the second dimension: looking up and down
Now it is time to try to make our eye look up and down. This is done by putting the entire mechanism on a pivot:
Adding another lever to actually move the pivot with a servo gives us already some cool looking eyes :-)
Now it was time to add some code and drive the thing using an ESP32 connected to an old Playstation 3 remote. And replace the googly eyes with some printed yellow eyes! I think the movement is really cool for just two small servos!
Adding eyelids
The next part was adding eyelids. I took heavy inspiration for these from James Bruton’s video and published model. In the end, we end up with this complicated looking thing:
