A first animatronic project is usually a stiff toy that waves an arm, so this one raises the bar early: the maker built a 3D-printed talking head that holds a conversation with an AI model, using an Arduino Uno as the controller for the head itself. For a first attempt at animatronics, going straight to speech and motion together is an ambitious pick.
The construction is what stands out. The head is printed in white and pink parts and houses two blue SG90 micro servos. One servo sits inside the head and drives a pink mechanical linkage attached to two pink eye discs. The second servo is mounted on the side and moves a hinged lower jaw through a pink lever arm. My favorite detail: the eye mechanism is a single printed object that needs no extra pieces, metal, or strings. For anyone who has fussed with wire-and-pulley eye rigs, a one-piece printed linkage seems like a smart approach. Multi-colored jumper wires run from the servos to the Uno, and the Uno connects to a laptop over a blue USB cable.
The laptop side runs a Spanish-language interface with a field for an AI question and another for the robot's spoken reply, and it shows numerical readouts for mouth and gaze angles alongside animated 2D eye and mouth graphics. In the demo, clicking that interface makes the printed jaw swing wide open and bob up and down, and the eyes shift position too. The maker even lifts the whole head to show the internal servo bracket and linkages before setting it back down.
The open question for me is where the AI conversation itself actually runs. The head is wired to the Uno, but the interface lives on the laptop, so the split between what each side handles is not spelled out anywhere.