As I’m sure most regular readers know by now, I was was planning to take my tail to Furnal Equinox. It was a mad rush to get everything done and a few major modifications to the electronics were made, but I’m happy to say that my tail made it to FE.

With a week to go before FE, it very quickly became apparent that my original board was not going to work. I didn’t have time to make a wireless remote for it and it was far too large to fit into my pocket.



The original controller design was huge! It was very nearly 30mm tall without including the battery pack that has to go on the back in order to power everything. There was no way it was going to fit into my pocket. I could have easily made it fit with a custom PCB and surface mount components, but with FE less than a week away, I certainly didn’t have the time to do that.

It was clear that I had to redesign the electronics to fit using parts that I had available.

I quickly got to work designing and etching a new board that I was confident would fit in my pocket. The new board didn’t include a wireless transceiver, but it was small and included four buttons.

This board is based around an Arduino pro mini clone I had sitting around. The pro mini includes an on-board 3.3v regulator and a couple of LEDs, so I didn’t need to add much hardware besides the buttons and a few passives. After assembling the board, I got to quickly porting my code to the new platform. This was actually fairly straight forward as I wrote wrappers around most low level hardware specific functions. I was able to get things working again on the new board in just a couple of hours.



With the new board working, I designed an enclosure for it. I went through quite a few iterations of this enclosure before I was satisfied. I had originally intended to put the battery pack on the back as before, but this made the enclosure too big once again. I later decided to put the battery pack on my belt beside the tail after a friend suggested it.

The controller tucks easily into my pocket, while the batteries stay on my belt (the small piece of electrical tape was added to prevent things like loose change from getting inside the enclosure or shorting the programming header). The battery pack has a simple belt loop screwed into it.

Unfortunately, I ran into issues getting the connectors for the battery pack that I wanted in time and ended up using automotive spade terminals.

These seem to work well in this application as they have excellent vibration resistance and can handle the required current easily. Unfortunately, one of my connectors had a bad crimp and I didn’t realize it until unpacking my tail. It ended up breaking immediately upon removing it from my bag and I wasn’t able to fix it immediately as I had forgotten some of my tools.



Fortunately, I’m not the only furry into electronics and making things and after asking around, I was able to borrow a pair of pliers and temporarily fix it. I forced a pin from one of my buttons through the connector to “uncrimp” it and widen it enough to get the wire back through it. I then recrimped it around the wire. This worked but unsurprisingly, the crimp didn’t really hold too well and I was forced to push the wire back in a few times.

I was able to keep the tail working for the entire con, however. I had a lot of fun using it, and I got to talk to a lot of furries about animatronics and electronics!

I’ll be taking a short break from this project to work on something else but the next step for this project will be working on reducing the noise from the servo. It is pretty difficult to notice in the noisy public con space, but It seems that a few people heard the tail before noticing it was moving.

