While the holochess board seen in Star Wars aboard the Millennium Falcon has been seen recreated many times, we bet you’ve never seen one that plays music.

This interesting project started life as a static holochess prop made by replica-building company Blue Realm Studios. It was then modified with a Raspberry Pi and a 160 watt amp by the folks over at Hyperdyne Labs.

A keyboard and a monitor are attached to the outside of the prop, but t’s inside is where things become interesting. Because the only place for the speakers to be mounted was underneath the board, the sound quality wasn’t that great. As a solution, a mechanism was created to lift the surface up so the music can be heard better.

See it in motion:

That video above was actually posted a month ago, but we couldn’t not write about it, it’s just too cool. The only other site we found with a story on it is Hackaday, and you should give them a click because they have more pictures of the project.

To end off on another piece of older Star Wars news: once you beat the campaign of  LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you gain access to a holochess board. Instead of being a strategy game, it’s actually a battle arena that makes good use of the LEGO games’ historically uninteresting combat. It’s also great for farming studs to unlock more parts of the game.

[Sources – hackster.io | Hackaday]