Meet Professor Fuzzles!

Professor Fuzzles is an animatronic bunny head that looks around and sniffs.  Well, a proper bunny sniff would scrunch the nose, but instead it's moving its head a bit up and down.  Close enough!  This head will get reunited with its body once I mount everything on its display shelf.

Here's the stuffed bunny head I started with.  I liked that it had a slightly miffed-looking expression, and thought that might work nicely in the haunted house.

Disapproving bunny disapproves!

I replaced its eyes with a pair of my slightly larger toy eyes modified to glow by adding a pair of LEDs behind each eye.  I put yellow LEDs behind a pair of green eyes.

After eye replacement surgery.

I intend to power the eyes through a wall wart plugged in to a Power Switch Tail, so I can control turning them on and off from an Arduino or other microcontroller.

Here the eyes are lit.

I've given the Professor a top hat, found in a hobby store.  The head is sitting on top of a pair of standard-sized servos in a pan-and-tilt bracket assembly, mounted on a Maker Beam frame.  I'd started out using micro servos, which fit better in the head, but the gears stripped out before long.  The standard sized servos seem to be plenty tough for Professor Fuzzles' noggin.

glowing toy eyes

So I want to give my animatronic critters glowing eyes.  I've got an eye together now that I think will serve the purpose.  It's a toy eye with two LEDs stuck between the eye and the backing piece, with cardboard wrapped in foil around the sides.

Here are the LEDs before they went around the eye.  I've soldered a 47 Ohm resistor to one leg of each of the yellow LEDs.  The foil-wrapped cardboard piece is taped to one of the LEDs here.  I'm using speaker wire to hook it all up.

The painted eye diffuses the LED light well, and the yellow light behind a turquoise-painted eye produces a nice effect.  Although not very bright, in the dark of the haunted house these eyes should show up well.

I intend to wire up a matching eye for this one, and mount them both inside a bunny head.  The bunny head I want to put on a pan-and-tilt bracket, to make it look around.