Server Status

When working on software development in a team environment, it’s important to know the status of your build at all times. Jenkins can display build automation info on a screen but where’s the fun in that? A popular office project is to build some kind of visual display of a project’s status, and [dkt01] has done just that with this stack light build monitor.

In this day and age of online shopping, random bits of industrial hardware are just an eBay away, so it’s easy to find some cool lamps or indicators for any project. [dkt01] sourced a standard 24V stack light off the shelf. With its green, red, and yellow indicators, its perfect for showing the current status of their build server.

The project uses an Arduino Pro Micro combined with an ENC28J60 Ethernet adapter. We used to see that chip all the time but in 2017 it’s somewhat of a classic setup with the great unwashed masses largely migrating to the ESP8266. However, for the purposes of this project, it was perfect for connecting to the wired office network (after all, you want to know the status of your build and not of your WiFi). [dkt01] even managed to get a web configuration to work despite the relatively meager resources of the ATmega32u4.

The build is cleanly executed, with the microcontroller and Ethernet hardware tucked into a 3D printed base for the stack light’s enclosure. It’s far more likely to become a permanent office fixture if it’s a tidy build without wires hanging out everywhere so a custom PCB ties everything together neatly. In another nice touch, the stack lights flash on initialization to indicate if the DHCP lease was successful, which makes troubleshooting easier. There’s an overview of all different light combinations and meanings in the video after the break.

Overall it’s a solid build with some off-the-shelf components that serves a genuine purpose. For a similar project built on a smaller scale, check out the Indictron. For something bigger, show us how you’ve learned to output your server status on the city’s traffic lights. Ask first, though.
Continue reading “Jenkins Given An Industrial Stack Light For Build Reporting” →

LED

One of the benefits of writing for Hackaday is the ability to command at will a legion of readers to descend on unsuspecting web servers. Most of the time a server can handle the load of thousands of connections. On the rare occasion, though, a server is turned into a pile of slag and dross to the satisfaction of us here at Hackaday and to the ire of admins everywhere.

Checking to see if your server is still running or not isn’t terribly interesting, though. [Eric] thought it would be cool to have a proper physical visualization of how busy his server is, and ended up using a blink(1) USB-controllable LED to display his current server load.

The blink(1) is a small, USB controlled RGB LED that can be used as a universal indicator light. [Eric] had the idea of plugging it in to one of his servers and having the brightness of the LED change in response to the load on the server. He did this with a Python script that queries the Google Analytics API and returns a value from 0 to 255 in response to how popular his server was in the last 10 minutes.

Of course, there’s always a chance Hackaday could Slashdot his server. In that case, the blink(1) glows a steady red, alerting [Eric] to his popularity.