Alastor Mad Eye Moody Costume With Anamatronic Eye

This year my son wanted to be Alastor "Mad Eye" Moody from Harry Potter for Halloween. Because they don't sell a commercial costume for this (and it's funner to make our own), we decided to put it together with a moving bionic eye. It turned out great and everyone knew exactly who he was and told him how cool his costume was!

Step 1: Clothing

For the clothing, the real Mad Eye Moody wears a leather coat with buckles, black pants, and a brown leather duster coat. Many of those things are pretty dang expensive and we weren't going to buy them so our son could wear them for one night.

Brown Leather Duster: We lucked out and found a cheap (~$6) generic cowboy costume at Walmart. It comes with the jacket and a flimsy hat. We tossed the hat in the kids costume dress up bucket, and then modified the coat slightly. The costume we got came with 4 "buckles" on the coat (2 on the chest area and 2 on the sleeves). We cut these off of the coat (and saved them for the next step) and the "leather duster" was done.

Black Leather Jacket with Buckles: If you have a leather jacket, you could just use that, but we didn't have one, so we took a black sweatshirt, and we sewed a zipper onto it (we didn't cut the shirt, we just sewed the zipper to look like it could zip up and down, no need to actually make it functional). We just used a straight stitch on our sewing machine, and sewed it right to the outside of the shirt running up the middle, but if you don't have a machine, you could easily do the same with hand sewing. For the buckles, we grabbed the parts we cut off the leather duster costume, and then sewed them onto the front of the sweat shirt. They worked perfectly, and really added to the costume. If you didn't have the buckles from that coat, you could make your own very similar buckles with some craft store clasps and strips of black fabric.

Black Pants: We just used his black church pants. Any black pants would work.

Staff: For the staff, my son just went out and found a stick he liked. We sanded down the bark and any splintery looking parts, and called it good. Didn't bother trying to shape it or anything, it just added a fun touch to the costume, and my son loved tapping it along while trick or treating.

Step 2: Mad Eye Moody Bionic Eye

For the eye we borrowed heavily from the Adafruit Bionic Eye tutorial (https://learn.adafruit.com/3d-printed-bionic-eye/o...). They did an awesome job detailing most of the build, so there is no need to explain the wiring and such again, just visit their project page for those details. I am going to detail what I did different though so you can replicate how I did it if you'd like.

This was the first test fit for the animatronic eye. Working great.

Tour of the animatronic eye.

3D Printing: We 3D printed the eyeball, socket, and motor mount just like the Adafruit tutorial, but we also 3D printed the goggle part as well. I have uploaded the 3D model of the goggle part we printed. It was edited from an existing goggle model on Thingiverse, but I had to resize it to fit the socket from Adafruits bionic eye project. I printed the goggle out at .2 layer height in black PLA (I was going to do .1 for a nicer finish, but I printed at .2 to test the size first, and it turned out so well, I just stayed with that). Once I had it printed out, I hit it with some gold metallic spray paint to make it look more like the one from the movie. I left the socket the same black PLA (unpainted) as I felt it looked better that way. And I left the eyeball and motor mount the white PLA. I used a sharpie marker to color the pupil and blue part of the eye on the 3D printed eyeball. One thing that I did a little different than the Adafruit project was to leave the little white dot in the pupil on my project, I think it looks much better that way, and it was easy to add (I just didn't color the marker on that spot).

Strap: The strap is just 1/2" black elastic. I was able to thread it into the side of the goggle and then also through a little detail piece on the oposite side. I just sewed it in place once it was fitting nicely. I also ran the power wires along the strap on the inside. I just sewed the wires along the way fairly loosley (I didn't want to restrict the elastic from stretching, but I wanted it to neatly hold the wires all the way to the back of the battery pack).

Electronics: Since my son had to wear this on his eye, I made a little scrap of black cloth to cover the electronics. I also stuffed some quilt batting in the back, so there weren't any hard edges that could poke out at his eye. I just super glued the black cloth all around the inside of the goggle part.

Cushion: Again, since my son had to wear this all night, I took some 3/8" foam backer rod (found in the weather stripping section of your hardware store), and cut a shallow strip down the center of a long piece of it. I then put a bead of hot glue in the shallow slit, and pushed it onto the edge of the goggle that would touch my sons eye socket. He said it was much more comfortable with that in place.

Glasses: As you may have noticed, my bionic eye has glasses attached to the other side. My son wears glasses, and since we are already limiting his vision with taking away one eye, I figured he better be able to see out of the other side (would be too dangerous to have him walking around half blind and blurry on Halloween night). I took an old pair of his glasses (the perscription was good, but the arm was broken and they didn't fit his growing head well anyways) and I used an exacto knife to start cutting the frames a little bit at a time. I had my son wear the eye, and then I just held up the glasses to see where I needed to shave a little more off. Once I had a good fit, I marked on the goggle part where they needed to be attached, and then I took the eye ball off of my son, and hot glued the half glasses to the goggle part so that when he wore the eye ball, the glasses would be in the right spot. It worked out great.

Battery: I didn't have a 3xAAA pack like they did in the tutorial, but I did have a 3xAA, so I just used that. It was a little bit bigger and bulkier, but my son wore it all night without any problems. Either would work fine here.

Step 3: Code (Trinket AND Arduino)

We used the 5v Trinket micro controller exactly how it was detailed in the Adafruit project page, and we didn't have to make any adjustments to the code (https://learn.adafruit.com/3d-printed-bionic-eye/the-code). But, if you don't want to use the trinket and would rather use an actual arduino, then the code will not work. You can check out the following code for details and modified code to try (https://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=82572). I have not tested this out with an arduino, but thought I would add this bit in here just in case anyone wanted to do it with an arduino pro mini or something similar (looks very promising).

Step 4: Finished Costume

My son had a blast with the costume, and it was really fun to make. The Adafruit guide was super, and all of the modifications worked out better than I expected. He wore it all night long (and most of the day for other Halloween activities they had going on in our town). Everyone loved his costume and the eye was perfect for it.