Dark Dude Poken
The current Pokens available are nice, cute and all, but they lack one major factor: cuddlyness. Plus, the hard plastic casing always makes noise when attached to my bag which gets on my nerves after a while. Also, I’m somewhat paranoid that the Panda shell will fall off while I travel and only the hand remains.
So I went to town and looked around for some small, cuddly thing that would fit on my bag, wouldn’t make that much noise and that I would be confident to be able to hold a Poken. Also I wanted it to be fairly cheap as I didn’t know how customizing Pokens would turn out.
After some prodding around, I found a Dark Dudes figure. I first mistook it for a cat but they say it’s a bunny. Whatever, catbunny – it’s big enough to stick a Poken in it and it’s roughed up anyway, so one might easily overlook some scars that I’ll add to it while customizing.
The first task was to rip the poor thing open. However, be a bit careful and only cut the stitches – saves a lot of time as you don’t need to repait anything later.
After that I stuffed some wool back to act as a cushion for the Poken hardware, added the Poken and sewed it all back together. Pretty easy, actually. There were only three things to keep in mind:
1) The battery of a normal Poken is not attached to the small circuit board. So you have to make sure it stays in place. In my case, I just used the lower part of the hand to hold it together and taped it. This way, I also kept the USB-lash on the end.
2) Make sure you can see the status LEDs of the Poken. It’s no fun to high four someone just to realisze at home that it didn’t work.
3) If you want to put a Poken inside something you still have to worry about the USB port. Otherwise you’d still be able to high four people but would not be able to retrieve their data from your Poken. So either plan for easy retrieval of the Poken or make the USB port accessible. In my case, I just took a leg of the catbunny and put that around the USB jack. Then I sew back the leg on a small leash. Result: I can take the leg off and reveal the port and can’t loose the leg while doing so.
And that’s pretty much it. Of course you have to be a bit careful when handling the hardware of your Poken, but all in all it’s pretty straight forward. I now got a cuddly Poken to attach to my bag that doesn’t get on my nerves. It’s pretty tough and it fits. Of course I’ll curse the day when I have to replace the battery, but that will be fixed in the next model 
Tags: cuddly, customization