I always wanted to have a flexible build indicator in hardware, that shows if something is wrong. Best would be a traffic light thing, but when you watch over many builds, its better to have a little more flexibility. One colleague of mine showed me the phantastic Adafruit website. After some looking around I decided that the most flexible stup for me would be a Raspberry together with a so called DotStar led strip.

Fortunately the tutorial at the adafruit website was very nice so even I managed to assemble the HW together first try. It till looks a little rough, but for now it works.

Unfortunately Adfruits DotStar library is only available as python module. This means that the code to control the led-strip via SPI cannot easily be reused for my favorite scripting language. Luckily the control of the led strip is straightforward cpp binding that was also easily to bring into the ruby world with the help of rice.

On top of this a simple ruby program poll my build-servers and shows some different lights and animations.

Make hardware setup nicer.

Make use of rx-ruby. My first try with this leaked like hell, so I did it everything from scratch. Still would be nice to have a working rx implementation in ruby.