Mad Eye For The WiFi

In the Harry Potter universe, Professor Moody was, perhaps unfairly, given the nickname Mad Eye for the prosthetic eye he wore. His eye remains a challenge for technically-minded cosplayers aiming to recreate the look and feel of this unique piece of headgear. [cyborgworkshop] had already mastered the basic eye, but wanted to take things further.

The original build relied on a sub-micro servo to move the eyeball. This was done at random as an attempt to simulate the eye’s behaviour in the books and films. However, wanting more, [cyborgworkshop] decided to make the eye more reactive to its surrounding environment. Using the Adafruit Huzzah, a breakout board for the ESP8266, code was whipped up to detect the number of WiFi access points in the area. The more access points, the more frequent and erratic the movement of the eye. Occasional slower periods of movement are coded in before the eye resumes its wild darting once more, depending on just how saturated the local WiFi environment is.

It’s a great twist on the project, and [cyborgworkshop] has provided more details on the initial build, too. If you think you’re having déja vu, check out this build using recycled parts.

12 thoughts on “Mad Eye For The WiFi

  1. What if the eyes targeted people’s phones with wifi, and looked at them. I don’t know how hard that’d be, it might work if you have a mesh network of “eyes” that triangulate (I hope I used it correctly) wifi devices and map the location of the phones, so the eyes follow all of the phones and thus their owners in the room.

    1. That was my original plan, but it was going to require at least 2 antennas and a bit more power then I was willing to dedicate. The whole thing has to run for 4 or 5 hours on a small lipo but it’s something Im looking into for a Halloween project

        1. with just 2 antennas, the plan is to look for the strongest beaconing device and just roughly follow it. Because of the way RF likes to bounce around it wouldn’t be accurate enough to be convincing for the eye, but for something like a scare crow head it should work out.

  2. Servos? Wouldn’t it make more sense to add 5 electromagnets to the back and glue a magnet in the back of the (ping pong ball) eye? Silent, freakishly fast, infinitely positionable “pupil”, simple. Add OpenCV and follow people’s faces between random super-spaz periods.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.