Remy the Rat

Description

This project was inspired by @shebuildsrobots on Instagram. We modified her design to create a 3D printed rat (Remy) from the movie Ratatouille with servo-controlled arms with holes for hair to be threaded through and red LED eyes. We used Blender to design the rat ourselves and an Arduino nano every to program the arms to move randomly. We would like to eventually expand on this project to include Bluetooth control to avoid wires running down the wearer’s hair. If you would like to make this project and have questions, feel free to reach out to us.

Details

We created a 3D-printed version of the rat (Remy) from the movie Ratatouille that is both mechanically and electronically enhanced. The hands have holes that hair can be threaded through and the arms are servo-powered to move randomly. The eyes are replaced with red LEDs which makes him ready for world domination.

Hardware Used:
- Microcontroller: Arduino Nano Every
- Actuation: Micro servo motors for arm movement
- Lighting: Red LEDs for eyes
- 3D Printing Material: PLA
- Power: Powered via USB or battery pack

Design Process:
- 3D Design: Created from scratch using Blender
- 3D Printing: Iterated through multiple prints to refine size and movement
- Electronics & Wiring: Integrated servos and LEDs, programmed using Arduino IDE
- Assembly & Painting: Painted the final model, glued the servo motors to the back, and glued the rat feet to the headband to make the entire headband wearable.

This project brought Remy to life and made some friends laugh. We hope you enjoy it and use our STL files or blender model to build one yourself 🐭!

All credit for the idea goes to @shebuildsrobots on Instagram. We love her creative robotics projects and wanted to try to improve on one ourselves.

Files

Remy v9 Adding Arms.blend

The final blender model of the body and arms. If you choose to make edits of this and export as an STL, only select the body and arms (leave out the boxes and holes used to create boolean modifiers) and check the "only export selected" box.

blend - 2.04 MB - 03/23/2025 at 15:22

Download

remy_ratatouille_cs12.ino

The arduino code for the LED and servo arm control.

ino - 1.30 kB - 03/19/2025 at 19:04

Download

remy_left_arm.stl

The STL (CAD) file for the rat's left arm.

Standard Tesselated Geometry - 126.35 kB - 03/19/2025 at 19:03

Download

remy_body.stl

The STL (CAD) file for the body including space at the back for micro servo motors and holes through the back of the head for LEDs for the eyes.

Standard Tesselated Geometry - 772.54 kB - 03/19/2025 at 19:03

Download

remy_right_arm.stl

The STL (CAD) file for the rat's right arm.

Standard Tesselated Geometry - 126.35 kB - 03/19/2025 at 19:03

Download

Components

1 × Arduino Nano Every microcontroller

2 × Red LEDs for the eyes. You can also choose whatever color you want. At one point we wanted to use RGB LEDs and have the colors change from green to red, but this is too many wires...

1 × Resistors You can choose whatever resistance you want for the eyes -- we chose a low resistance so the eyes were extremely bright since we thought it was funny. Up to you how much you want to blind the other people in the room.

1 × Breadboard Electronic Components / Misc. Electronic Components

2 × Micro Servo Motors for the arm movements

Project Logs

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Week 9 (Final Week)
Tanisha Agarwal • 03/20/2025 at 18:20 • 0 comments

We finally got a model of Remy printed that we were satisfied with and we painted it to look like the rat. We added the servo motors to the back (glued it using a glue gun) and then added the LEDs. We wrote down the Arduino code for movement of the servo motors and to adjust brightness of the LEDs and soldered the wires so we could keep the battery-powered arduino in the pocket instead of a headband. We have a working model of Remy!
Week 7 and 8
Tanisha Agarwal • 03/20/2025 at 18:16 • 0 comments

We worked on the Blender models - trying to create different version of Remy and 3D printing them. Once we had a model that looked like the rat we decided to make holes in the eyes so we could fit LEDs there and have space hollowed out in the back of the rat so that we could attach the servo motors there. Once we printed the rat we realised that the arms were too big and since we had just made donut like structures for the hands, it looked unrealistic. We will focus on these features to change and print the final model next week,
Week 5
Tanisha Agarwal • 02/08/2025 at 05:43 • 0 comments

We focused this week on learning Blender, but faced serious time constraints due to midterms coming up and getting behind on homework. We started watching tutorials by "Blender Guru" on Youtube and don't think the process will actually be as hard as we were worried about. This should make it a lot easier to include slots for the LEDs and change the arm motor design. Additionally, we have decided to scale up the rat quite a bit.
Week 4
Tanisha Agarwal • 02/08/2025 at 05:43 • 0 comments

After the meeting last week, we realized that editing the mesh file @shebuildsrobots has on her GitHub is not very feasible... when we tried to upload our CAD file to the 3D printing software (Orca), the design would change and random holes were added to Remy's head, and we had countless issues with spiraling and sizing. Instead, we opted to design the rat ourselves from the ground up using Blender. The focus for this week will be starting on Blender tutorials. Since this is a pretty major bottleneck in our project, we are cutting down on our goals to get rid of the accelerometers and are now instead going to have the arms move randomly using only the arduino nano every.

View all 4 project logs

Build Instructions

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Download blender file or the 3 separate STL files in the Files section.

If you want to make changes to the blender model, download the blender file and open in Blender (note: this software is free and is extremely useful!). Make changes to the blender as needed and export as an STL for 3D printing. If you keep the cutouts, make sure you only select the actual body and arms -- leaving out the parts used for boolean modifier cutouts -- and check the "only export selection" box when you export as an STL. Otherwise, download the body, left arm, and right arm STL files.

Upload STL files to 3D printing software and print.

You can use a software such as Orca slicer or any other 3D printing software. We recommend using tree supports and trying to avoid placing them on the ears since it will make the print come out a bit rougher. It doesn't really matter what filament color you print the rat in, since you can paint over most 3D print filaments. However, gray will show up better on some filament colors than others.

Paint the 3D print.

Paint the body a light/neutral gray and paint the inside of the ears, hands, and feet pink.

Discussions

Remy the Rat

Description

Details

Files

Remy v9 Adding Arms.blend

remy_ratatouille_cs12.ino

remy_left_arm.stl

remy_body.stl

remy_right_arm.stl

Components

Project Logs

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Week 9 (Final Week)

Week 7 and 8

Week 5

Week 4

Build Instructions

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Discussions

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Description

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Files

Remy v9 Adding Arms.blend

remy_ratatouille_cs12.ino

remy_left_arm.stl

remy_body.stl

remy_right_arm.stl

Components

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