The Fretboard is a pretty simple Arduino project that visualizes the build status of up to 24 projects with an addressable LED array. The latest incarnation of the project is housed in an old classical guitar hence the name ;-)
It's all open-sourced, so check out the "Resources" page for code. Feel free to borrow any ideas for your own build.
The build has been a slow burn 3 months of little packages of components arriving from China, and another couple of months procrastinating over different ideas for housing the project - the physical build is far more involved than the electronics, which couldn't be simpler!
The heart of the project is an Arduino with an Ethernet Shield. It polls the web for current build status, parses the result, and drives an addressable LED array to display the status of up to 24 projects. The 24-project limit is an artificial one, imposed by the physical housing on a guitar neck (2 projects per fret to the 12th fret). It could do many more
See the FretBoard GitHub repository for the Arduino code and more details of the on-board processing.
The Arduino has limited memory and networking support, so to simplify process of getting build status, the request is proxied via a site which offers the build status in a simplified CSV format over HTTP.
A suitable proxy that can handle the CruiseControl XmlStatusReport format is included in the repository for this web application.
All the code and design details for The Fretboard are open-source. Feel free to fork or borrow any ideas for your own build. If you build anything similar, I'd love to hear about it - you contact me through GitHub or on twitter @tardate
You can support "The Fretboard" by checking out some ads or posting to your social network..