This chest incorporates the beating coronary heart of Davy Jones

The Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise actually likes to make figurative components and metaphors fairly literal, as proven in Lifeless Man’s Chest when the chest in query is proven to comprise the precise beating coronary heart of Davy Jones. That’s a enjoyable visible that Grendel Studios changed into a real-life prop.

The chest constructed by Grendel Studios isn’t a precise reproduction of what we see within the film, however it’s comparable in the entire vital methods and could be immediately recognizable to anybody conversant in the movie. If you get near the chest, you’ll hear the regular beating of a coronary heart. You probably have the important thing, you possibly can insert it into the lock and switch it. If you do, bolts throughout the lid will disengage and also you’re free to open the chest. Do this and also you’ll see a sensible coronary heart thumping away.

Grendel Studios 3D-printed the chest and the entire mechanical parts, with the exceptions being the welded-steel key and the outer pores and skin of the guts, which was manufactured from molded silicone. Inside the guts is a intelligent servo-driven mechanism that pushes out and in. An Arduino Nano R4 board controls that servo and the lid bolt servos by way of a servo driver module. The Arduino additionally powers a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 participant, linked to a speaker, by way of which the heartbeat sound results play. 

Grendel Studios already demonstrated the chest at Open Sauce 2025 and it’ll additionally make an look at this 12 months’s Maker Faire Rome.