Imagineering at home: I'm becoming the Black Pearl

A black 3D-printed cannon on a cluttered desk, its muzzle ring glowing white with a puff of mist rising out of it — A test cannon on my desk, mid-shot.

Becoming a Walt Disney Imagineer has been my dream job since I was a kid. My first trip to Disney World was in third grade, and Pirates of the Caribbean was one of my absolute favorite rides: the animatronics, the water ride, the full immersion into the life of a pirate.

Disney is in my blood. Everyone knows I love Disney. Disney World was the first place I ever traveled with my then-fiancée, now my wife. For the last 3 years we’ve taken the family there and shared the magic it gave me as a kid.

A family of four standing in front of a Mickey Mouse flower bed, below the Walt Disney World Railroad station — My family at Walt Disney World, 1999.

I was so excited when my son said he wanted to be Captain Jack Sparrow for Halloween this year. I’m not going as a pirate. I’m going as the ship.

I’m building the Black Pearl. A wearable one: a cardboard hull on shoulder straps, so I wear the whole ship and he sails along beside me. It’s the part of the job I don’t get to do on a paid install. Pure Imagineering, in my own garage, for an audience of one.

Design sketch of a stick figure wearing the ship on a shoulder strap, labeled: hull about 54 inches long and 24 inches in beam, deck about 42 inches at the waist, hull bottom about 27 inches, stern castle 8 inches higher, bowsprit 12 to 18 inches, mast top no higher than 78 inches, and gun ports — The design sketch, with the ship's proportions.

3D design model of the ship seen from the bow, worn by a figure in a pirate hat, with black tattered sails, rigging, a bowsprit and cannons along the hull — The design model, from the bow.

Top-down view of the design model: an oval opening in the middle of the deck, a bowsprit at the front, and four cannons along each side — From above: the opening I stand in, and four cannons a side.

The cannons

There are eight 3D-printed cannons, four down each side of the hull.

Timelapse inside a 3D printer: a black cannon barrel and smaller parts grow layer by layer from the build plate as the print head moves above them — One cannon's parts printing, sped up.

Each one has a WS2812 LED ring in the muzzle. It’s addressable RGB, so every cannon can do its own thing. A single cannon firing runs a little sequence I’m proud of.

First the fuse “lights”: the ring crackles in orange and yellow, flickering like a lit fuse burning down. It builds until the whole ring is a solid orange glow. Then it snaps to a bright white flash, and that flash is the moment the smoke comes out, for about a second and a half. Then the white settles into a hot red-and-orange glow, and the embers fade away around the ring until it’s dark again. Fuse, flash, smoke, embers.

A black cannon on a desk: its muzzle ring flickers orange, flashes white as a puff of mist rises, then glows red and fades to dark — One cannon running the full firing sequence.

Then there’s the smoke. Each cannon is fully self-contained. It has its own water reservoir holding about 40 milliliters, enough to keep the wick wet for a couple hours of trick-or-treating, and its own ultrasonic atomizer disc sitting about an inch and a half behind the LED ring, up inside the barrel. The disc comes out of a cheap humidifier atomizer kit. Everything around it I’m building.

Exploded-view drawing of one cannon, labeled: spring, wick, fill plug, cannon board, breech cartridge, atomizer disc, bay door, port plate, barrel, LED ring and muzzle liner — One cannon, from my assembly guide.

Looking down the barrel of a cannon at a ring of 12 small LEDs around the muzzle opening — The LED ring, seated in the muzzle.

Each cannon needs five signals: two for the mister, and three for the LED ring (power, ground and data). They run over an ordinary Cat5e patch cable with RJ45 plugs on both ends. The mister drive swings tens of volts at about 120 kHz, so it gets a twisted pair to itself, and the spare conductors double up the power and ground. That makes the cannons easy to fire independently, and easy to swap if one gets crushed on a driveway. It isn’t Ethernet, though, and the boards say NOT ETHERNET next to the jacks so nobody plugs a cannon into a network switch.

Two brains, one for each side

The brains are two boards I designed myself, one for port and one for starboard. Each one takes an ESP32 dev board in female headers, a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini for sound, and the drivers for four cannons. Each side runs off its own USB-C power bank, and the two sides talk to each other wirelessly over ESP-NOW. So instead of a rat’s nest of modules hot-glued to the inside of the hull, each side is one board doing light, mist and audio.

I’ve ordered both brain boards from JLCPCB, along with a small RJ45 breakout board for each cannon.

Wiring diagram titled Black Pearl Cannons, how everything is wired: a port and a starboard brain board, each with an ESP32, a DFPlayer Mini, a speaker, a USB-C power bank and four cannons on patch cables, linked by ESP-NOW, with a pin-by-pin table for one cannon — How it all wires up. Tap for full size.

Render of a green circuit board with four jacks labeled Cannon 1 to 4 and Not Ethernet, a speaker terminal, and sockets for the ESP32 and MP3 board — A render of one brain board. The real ones are on order.

It has an app, because of course it does

I built an app to control the cannons. I can fire one cannon, fire a whole side as a broadside, or fire all eight at once in a volley. Or I set it to run an automated show and just let it go off on its own while I hand out candy.

The cannon app's Fire screen: a top-down ship with four cannon buttons per side, P2 lit gold and P1 and P2 ringed in blue, a status line reading Firing, and effect buttons for port, starboard and full broadsides and a volley — The cannon app mid-broadside.

An ESP32 board wired with yellow jumpers to a clear breadboard, with a red and black lead running to a mist atomizer, on a wooden desk — The breadboard version, before the boards.

There will be sound, too, though it isn’t working yet. One speaker per side, driven by the DFPlayer. Cannon booms when they fire. And underneath it all, an ambient bed of a ship creaking on the water, with a certain famous line about dead men and the tales they don’t tell dropping in between shots. Every clip will be free and royalty-free, and that famous line will be a re-recorded royalty-free soundbite, not the movie audio.

Ghost ship mode

This is the one I can’t wait to see on a dark street. In ghost ship mode, every cannon ring stops being fire and goes cold. The LEDs flicker and glow in aqua green and dark blue, slow and creepy, like the Pearl rising up out of the water. And instead of sharp cannon puffs, the misters breathe out gently at different rates, so a low fog pools around the whole hull.

What’s left

The boards are on order. When they arrive, they get built up and the sound goes in. If I get all of that done and working, the stretch goal is some lighting on the outside of the ship to make the hull read better at night.

Halloween is the deadline that doesn’t move. If a cannon’s misfiring on the 30th, that’s a problem for the 30th. Either way, he’s getting his ship. I’ll post photos after.

And if anyone at Walt Disney Imagineering is reading this: I’d love to build the real thing.