Build Lights

Inspired by Bubble, Bubble, Build's in Trouble over at Pragmatic Automation, I set up something at my client that is extremely cool. And by “cool” here, I mean “almost painfully nerdy”.

Basically, I've hooked up a series of colored lights to our CruiseControl.NET build. Via X10 automation, I turn on red, green, and/or yellow lights based on the status of the build. It looks like this:

Since I put them up on top of my cube, the lights are visible across most of the part of the floor where my team sits. I already find myself looking up to check the status whenever I arrive in the morning.

The reason that two lights are on in this picture has to do with the semantics I attached to the signals. The red and green lights indicate whether the last build was successful or not. The yellow light indicates that a build is in progress. I could have shut off the red or green light while a build was running, but I thought this way added a little more information while still being very easy to understand at a glance.

It was actually pretty impressive how easy this setup was to get going. After ordering an automation kit ($99 from http://www.x10.com), downloading the free SDK, and stopping off at Target for some cheap lamps and some bulbs (about $25), some simple perusal of the samples showed that it's basically one line of very easy-to-understand code to turn each light on or off. Monitoring the build was only slightly harder: I just used cctraylib.dll from the CruiseControl distribution to poll the build state. That was maybe 20 more lines of code. Rolling it all up into a service (so it will continue to work when I'm not logged on) took me about 90 minutes total.

The kit came with a bunch of other stuff that I'm not using, like remote controls and a motion sensor, so I probably could have gotten off a little cheaper. But when I finish my gig here, I'll take the whole thing home and find a use for it around the house. Hopefully something equally nerdy. :)