So the first set of electronic components that I wanted to work out was the eyes. They're bright and expressive and they feature a great blinking animation (see the link below) but they were also a fun way to jump back into working on my soldering skills.

These came as a kit that I had to partially assemble then solder the 8x8 LED matrices onto their backpack control modules. After that's all done, set one as 0x70, and the other as 0x71 so that they have unique IDs and then put together the code to display the on/off LEDs. I put in the timing for the blink animation and generated the "frames" for each position. It's a lot of manual steps there, just like old-school sprite animating for video games. But the effect is just what I wanted.

A special note is that I'll be showing these again later when they're moved from the Arduino Uno Microcontroller (the larger blue board that all those wires run back to) over to the Adafruit Trinket (much smaller) and make the wires more permanent.
I'm also going to be arranging them in a much more reptilian manner, not side-by-side like they are shown here on my breadboard.

The animation of the eyes blinking. They stay open for about 5 seconds before blinking closed then open again.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qmtwnbe9l.....10103.mp4?dl=0
(will update this link from a dropbox video link to a youtube link as soon as I set that up)

All the work was done by me  swiftjames