Full-Scale Minecraft Enderman

Once again, Halloween showed up with both the inspiration and the hard, non-negotiable due date. This year I decided to build a full-scale Minecraft Enderman — the poor misunderstand guys with the glowing eyes — and stand him out in the front yard.

Building Big Is Its Own Problem

At this scale, everything becomes a tug-of-war between weight and stiffness. Endy needed to be light enough that I could move him around by myself, but rigid enough that he wouldn’t sadly fold under his own weight. He also had to be economical, and constructed in a matter of weeks. Not exactly a relaxing set of constraints.

I started where any reasonable person would: inside Minecraft. I scaled up an Enderman statue in-game and grabbed screenshots from orthographic angles. Minecraft blocks are conveniently one meter each, so those screenshots became a free dimensioned drawing. I pulled them into Illustrator and worked out the real-world sizes of the legs, body, head, and eyes from there.

The Magic Material: Garage Insulation

After circling two different hardware stores more times than I’d like to admit, the winning material turned out to be garage insulating foam — a one-inch polystyrene core with paper laminated on one faces. Stiff, light, cheap, and big. Exactly the trifecta I was after.

Sheet of paper-faced polystyrene garage insulation foam, about one inch thick

The trick to turning flat sheets into clean, hollow columns is all in the edges. I mitered every edge on my bandsaw at slightly less than 45 degrees, undercutting the v-groove just a hair. Then I’d lay the four panels out flat, edge to edge, with a strip of 2-inch 3M metallized outdoor tape running underneath the seams. A generous bead of construction adhesive went into each v-groove, and I folded the whole thing up into a tube and sealed the last edge with one more run of tape.

Cross-section of a finished foam column showing the mitered v-groove seams folded into a hollow square tube

Here’s the part I’m a little proud of: because the grooves are undercut, folding it up puts the inner foam into compression and the outer tape into tension. A nice little win-win that makes the columns far stiffer than they have any right to be. Same technique was used to build the body and the head.

Partially assembled Enderman in the workshop — taped foam legs and body standing on the bench next to the head

For the joints, I “dug” pockets into the foam and dropped in fat closet dowel rods so the whole thing could come apart for storage. The one genuinely humbling part of assembly was Endy’s height — I had to stand on a chair to put him together, and I couldn’t actually test a full-size assembly indoors.

Giving Him Eyes

The eyes are white opaque acrylic, recessed slightly into the face. Behind them sit a pair of NeoPixel rings from Adafruit, mounted on a foam insert inside the head. Getting the acrylic flush with the face was the key to selling the look — not difficult, just fussy. A simple Arduino Nano script drives the rings.

Close-up of the Enderman head with both NeoPixel eyes glowing bright purple-white

That same script also runs an extra NeoPixel port wired out to a separate light string — the purple “sparkles” you’ll see scattered around him in the night shots. One little Nano, two jobs.

To wire it all up, I cut a small flap in the back of the head, sealed the Nano up against the weather, and soldered on a DC power jack. Plug him in and… voila. Lights.

Enderman at night, eyes glowing, with purple sparkle lights surrounding him and the red Halloween house lights behind

Another night view from out front — glowing eyes and scattered purple lights against the porch

“Endy” is still around today, more than two years later, currently getting a little reconditioning after a couple of seasons standing watch over the yard every single night. Not bad for a pile of garage foam and tape.