Chain of Animated Eyes Blink Creepily from Hiding

As of this writing, Halloween is tomorrow, so if you’ve got a hack planned, you’d better get started! While the build featured here might be difficult to pull off in a day — unless you happen to have the right parts in your workshop — this hack by YouTuber “wermy” could at least provide inspiration for 2019.

His system chains together a number of 1.44 inch SPI-based screens, each of which display an individual eyeball to make a sort of spooky version of Christmas lights. Eyes are controlled by Adafruit ItsyBitsy M0 Express boards, with one of these boards used for every four eyes, allowing them blink and look around with a decent frame rate.

The eyes are chained together with a modded Ethernet cable, and feature a very nice (but not waterproof) enclosure that snaps together. This makes the whole project extremely scalable, and the chain can be powered by a USB powerbank for easy hiding and cleanup. If you do want to create one of these and don’t quite make Halloween, programming it with more joyful images of snowflakes, reindeer, and the like should be possible for double-holiday duty.

Arduino code for the build can be found here, and print files for the excellent case are also available. Be sure to check it out being made and blinking away in the video below!