RoboEyes

Demo videos on YouTube:

First of all let me say that I’m not a robotics expert. Just someone fooling about with a couple of servos, an Arduino and some programming. I have no idea if I’m wrong to file this in the Robotics category or if it should be somewhere else. If anyone can suggest a better category, feel free to let me know.

This little project incorporates 3D printing, RC servos, Arduino programming and Windows programming.

I used a couple of parts from Polymaker_3D’s ‘Eye Mechanism’ Thing. I used the socket.STL and based my eyeballs on the Ball_11.9.STL from the same Thing. So, thanks to Polymaker_3D for that.

The eyes move in two dimensions so they can look up, down, left and right. The movement is driven by RC servos (details of which I used in the post print section) and is controlled by an Arduino Nano. The Arduino Nano is connected to a Windows PC and I’ve written a Windows app to control the Nano.

The eyes follow you around

The Windows app has two ways of working: the eyes can follow the mouse on the screen, so as you move the mouse around the screen the eyes follow that movement; and, the if you have a webcam connected to the PC, the software tries to find faces in it’s view area and will move the eyes to make eye contact with any faces it finds, so, as you move around in front of RoboEyes, the eyes will follow you around.

The chassis is designed to stand on it’s own feet and nose or to sit atop a monitor. I’ve spaced the feet and the nose so that the gap between them (fore to aft) sits nicely on frame of my main monitor so that it looks back at me while I work at my screen.

The software (both the Arduino sketch and the Windows app) can be downloaded from http://paw-print.com/roboeyes