We ended up getting a lot of attention for the project and were asked to present at the 6th Annual National Symposium on Renewable and Sustainable Energy. We decided it would be time to start looking more into aesthetics...

And so the shell was born. Raymond Lueg created this masterpiece from the ground up out of 1/2" birch. When he finished, we started molding all of the sections together  to make it look like one solid piece of material. 

wetsanding the black primer....

And after some layers of paint!

After we painted it, we realized we wanted to do some more with it. So we took a router and routed out a front to imitate the Cylon Eye from Battlestar. For this effect we used a 2-way Mirror film so that it will look like a regular piece of mirror plexi, until we turn it in. (Also big thanks to Adafruit and their Neopixels!). I will go into a little more about the neopixels later on and what we did with them.