TADA!

It's done!

Man, this project took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.  I was sick all this week (after a grueling weekend of work on this), but luckily the only task at hand was to apply coats of varnish and wait for them to dry. Tonight I went in to the lab with the finished shell and put in the final 8 hours of cutting the sheet metal back plate, mounting the sensors, wiring the innards, and mounting the feet.  I am pleased with the end result.  What do you think?

The best part about today was that after I stuffed all the wires in the cavity and barely managed to secure the back plate, I found only two errors in the software that reads the sensors.  So I opened her back up and quickly resolved the issue.  Now I have a working controller.  I say this to stress the importance of prototyping.  If you ever want to build something of nontrivial complexity, prototyping is the only way to discover the 'essential' issues.  Without that knowledge, you're dead in the water because, believe me, the 'emergent' issues will be laying in wait when you go to do the final build.