Apr 04, 2023

Build TV

A build TV project, which allows a Raspberry Pi to serve as an information radiator for a development environment.

Features

Monitor Jenkins - poll multiple Jenkins views/instances/jobs, useful in a large development environment.
LED strip - ability to have a ws21x LED strip display patterns to indicate the build status, as well as standup and other events which can be customised.
Dashboards - display a series of dashboards, which can each display either a web-page or a Jira wallboard.
Notifications - display time-based notifications, which show an on-screen message and can change the LED strip to a defined pattern. Useful to notify the team of important events, such as daily standups.
Automated deployment - using Ansible, updates and changes to configuration can be rolled-out within a single command to multiple build TVs. This also means new build TVs are fast to setup. Useful in a large development environment.
Modular architecture - everything front-end is a client, with backend processes split into daemons by function, both sharing common libraries.
APIs - all daemons expose their REST APIs, used for inter-process communication, through a remote daemon. The remote daemon is able to call an external service, such as your own website, with a randomly-generated token on startup. This means your own applications/services can be built on top of the build TV, and even reside on a remote machine, to provide remote control.
Stats - a remote daemon service, running on each build TV, can report back statistics on its environment.