Google already provides a much nicer version of this, of course. And it's fair game for showing how to integrate with other systems, too. But I really want the students to see what's going on inside of everything, as well, and to this end, my visualizer is actually more accessible in the pedagogical sense. I don't want them to believe that other software is somehow magically different from what we could do. Google's is admittedly nicer (hey, they're Google, after all), but underneath the hood, the same concepts and practices that we apply are there.

And from here, we go where Google doesn't: to the actual physical engineering side of the system, which integrates computer science and electrical and mechanical engineering. This was fun to fabricate! I've split it into a separate description.