Baby Yoda's eye lids and ears are both controlled by servo motors. These servos are mounted on a platform inside of Baby Yoda's head shown below.
Baby Yoda's eye lids are connected to a wooden dowel that is mounted in the center of Baby Yoda's head. The dowel is turned by a servo motor so that the lids raise and lower, giving the effect of Baby Yoda opening and closing his eyes. Both the inner and outer eye lids were vacuum formed using a 3D-printed resin mold.
Side view animation of eye opening mechanism.
View of eye mechanism from behind.
Baby Yoda's pinwheel
Baby Yoda’s pinwheel is constructed of a 3D-printed stick, axle, spacer, base support, and pinwheel. For the pinwheel, we printed a thin flat square with cutouts along the diagonals. We then thermoformed the square into a pinwheel by dipping it into hot water and folding it into a pinwheel shape while the plastic was still soft from the heat. We attached magnets of opposite polarity to two of the folds. The hall effect sensor was placed inside the stick, with wires running through the stick and into the base. As the user blows on the pinwheel, the hall effect sensor detects every time a magnet passed by, and uses this change in magnetic polarity to determine when the pinwheel was spinning.
The 3D printed pinwheel before (left) and after (right) thermoforming.
badge Reel mechanism (Yoda's toy ball)
For our stretching interaction, users pull Baby Yoda's toy ball towards them and watch Baby Yoda's ears raise and lower proportional to the distance the ball is pulled. This ball is attached to the end of a badge reel string. When the user pulls the string, the inner spool within the badge reel spins. To sense this motion, we used a potentiometer. We modeled and 3D printed several parts including a badge reel interface, gears, a base for the badge reel, a base for the center gears, and a base for the potentiometer, as well as several adapting pieces. We used gears here because the potentiometer could only turn about 270 degrees while the badge reel spool would turn about 8 rotations as the string unwound. The video on the right shows the inner workings of this mechanism.