Nowadays Continuous Integration is popular and almost a “must-have”
on a serious project. The only question is - what is your current CI
status? How to make it visible? E-mails are good, but let’s be
honest, nobody reads all those tons of “build failed/back to
normal” messages. There is a need for some funny and unobtrusive
way to let anybody know what’s the status in a, say, second. So,
we’ve got “Traffic Lights CI status indicator”:
- visible;
- funny;
- it has DIY appearance(look at that fastening adhesive tape all over
it!);
- a bit environmental - an old colour music box was reused;
- portable (about 1 kg, it’s really light);
- inexpensive (~25 pounds).
The workflow is simple: homemade client application checks CI status
and sends “turn on red and turn off green” like messages to the
microcontroller, the microcontroller turns on/off corresponding
bulbs. As for the colours: “green” means everything is good,
“blue(yellow)” means we’ve got some test(s) failed and “red”
means that it’s time to hurry up since something is completely
broken. That’s all.
