Information Radiators: Extreme feedback with Bamboo

This little project was inspired by the Ultimate Wallboard contest, our effort to find your best status boards, information radiators and wallboards. If you have a wallboard, simple or sophisticated, we want to know about it! Check out the contest site to enter for a chance to win prizes.

Hacking Bamboo with Arduino

We wanted to integrate an Arduino board with Bamboo such that it would light up an orb in different colors, like turning red when the build fails. Putting my MSc degree in electronics to use, I have created something like that, using an Arduino board and a bunch of trivial peripherals like a board and an ethernet controller. Total add-on costs were around $70 USD.

The result consists of:

• a Bamboo plugin that performs a POST call on the web server embedded in the board
• the ugliest-looking circuit board known to man
• web server code embedded in said board, which lights up either red or green LED depending on what POST is received by it

How it works

When the build succeeds, the Bamboo plugin does a POST to the board’s server, with
submit=Success parameter. When the build fails, it POSTs submit=Failure.
This causes either red or green LED to light up.

I have also hooked up a relay, so that you can plug in any 110/220V device to the board to light up an orb (or a light bulb, an alarm siren, electric chair to
kill the build breaker or whatever else you wish).

Construction

Putting it all together took me a bit less than 2 days of work. The plugin works on Bamboo 2.6.2 and 2.7. I also had to create a subset of libc for the Arduino board (a bunch of string-related routines), as the ones provided in the Arduino SDK didn’t work properly.

Diagram of the required circuit to connect to the Arduino board:

Source code

The Bamboo plugin can be downloaded from PAC.  The source code and binary downloads for the embedded web server and Bamboo plugin are hosted on Bitbucket code hosting site. 

Binaries are available for both Bamboo 2.7 and Bamboo 2.6.2, as well as the the Arduino board controller.

Happy hacking!