motion detector?

I have a customer who wants me to make him a custom set of glowing LED-lit eyes for a taxidermy mount he is doing, which I told him I could do. He also is requesting that these eyes be turned on/off with a motion detector of some sort, or "motion activated" as he put it.

Here are a couple of pictures to show what I mean. The first is a set of eyes that I have rigged up with a battery pack and an on/off switch. This will be a fake werewolf mount of course as the switch and batteries are in the top of the head. On a real animal (2nd picture), the batteries and switch are on the back or base of the mount.



The customer wants a set up like this but with something to trigger the lights to come on (I didn't ask him if he wanted them to stay on for a few seconds, or stay on until the motion sensor is interrupted again, but I assume that he wants them to come on, stay on for a few seconds and then go off until triggered again). The sensor would be disguised on the base the animal is mounted on.

Now, this is beyond my area of expertise, and I really don't know where to start. My electronics knowledge is pretty minimal as well. Can anything like this be purchased (or removed and adapted from something cheap, like a toy?) or built? Any suggestions or ideas?

I've done some motion sensor stuff before, but they usually require a higher operating voltage like 12v or are line powered. You may want to do a line powered setup if your customer doesn't mind having to plug it in.

You can get motion sensor wall switch units pretty cheap in the area of $15 or so, you could just use it to switch on a wall wart type supply that would power the LEDs in the eyes.

DC stuff is harder to find and will probably be more expensive, and I dunno what the current draw would be like.

Hope this helps

Motion Detector module and Kit

There's alot of other neat stuff on that site...

If you buy any kind of motion-detector module, remember to always ask for the fresnel lens.

PIRs are almost useless, without a fresnel lens or a grating window that make strips of field in detection areas, cause all them works with the variation of the infrared on the PIR element, not just with the presence of IR.

Otherwise, you can build a very cheap photoresistor system, that "see" the variation of the light through a 1mm hole, and trigger a circuit, like the ones in the cheap "chime bells" for doors ..... it's more sensitive than PIRs to random light variation, but the "sensor" can be hidden practically everywhere in the head (nose, mouth, so on), being a tube long 3 cm, with 3 or 4 mm of diameter, with an 1mm hole in front ..... where instead the PIRs still need a decent field of view, for work good.

Let me know if you need a schematic, for this