Animatronic eyes with lids
Eyes that glance about and blink behind a sculpted face, with upper and lower lids on their own servos.
- Eye diameter and spacing (mm)
- 32 and 84
- Travel, yaw and pitch (deg)
- +-25 and +-20
- Print time
- 8.5 h on 5 plates
- Filament
- 341.0 g
Colourway
- Dark gray main
- Jade white second
- Cyan accent
About the design
Two eyes look out of a sculpted face, left, right, up and down together, while their upper and lower lids open, close, squint and widen, driven by four SG90 micro servos from an Arduino or a Pico. The face is a realistic head carved away just clear of the lids. Each eye prints face up, so the AMS lays down a white sclera, a blue iris and a black pupil by height, and it presses onto its carrier, so eyes swap without tools. The lids are shells round the eyes, so the eyes turn freely inside them, and each pair of lids hangs straight on its own servo's shaft. The whole cradle tilts on the pitch servo, and it carries its servos close round the tilt axis, so that servo holds it with a small share of its strength. Printed stops end the eyes' travel, and pins are filament or M2 screws, never print-in-place joints.
What you can change
- Eye diameter and spacing
- Iris and pupil size
- Lid clearances, thickness and travel
- The face's depth, height and eye openings
- Yaw and pitch travel and the stop margin
- Servo size and horn hole radius
- Pin size and clearances
Specifications
- Eye diameter and spacing (mm)
- 32 and 84
- Travel, yaw and pitch (deg)
- +-25 and +-20
- Upper lid, closed / open / widest
- -4 / 30 / 40 deg
- Lower lid, closed / open / widest
- 0 / -24 / -30 deg
- Tilting load, solid PLA
- 126 g
- Pitch servo's holding torque (share of its stall torque)
- 1.8%
- Overall width x depth x height
- 253 x 110 x 113 mm
- Eye centres above the table
- 63 mm
- Servos
- 4 x SG90, on their own 5 V supply
- Face
- Blender Studio's CC0 head at 1.27 times life size
Printing
| Project | Plates | Hours | Grams |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animatronic eyes with lids, PLA Basic | 5 | 8.5 | 341.0 |
| Total | 5 | 8.5 | 341.0 |
Times and weights come from the Bambu Studio 02.08.02.61 slice at 0.20 mm layers. Each figure is rounded on its own.
In the room
Credits and licence
The layout, two eyes behind upper and lower lids on SG90 servos with a tilting frame, follows Project Eye v5 by Galip Koray Sahin (https://github.com/Rynnat/project-eye, MIT License, Copyright (c) 2026 Galip Koray Sahin). No file of it is used.
The face is Blender Studio's realistic sculpting head from Human Base Meshes v1.4.1 (https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/), released CC0.
Lessons from the builders' comments on Will Cogley's EyeMech mechanisms (https://makerworld.com/en/models/1184807, CC BY-NC-SA) shaped the pins, stops and removable eyes. No file of them is used.
- Licence
- All rights reserved