Our fully automated project ecosystem provides us with feedback of very different type and granularity. We felt it was impossible to render every single notable event into its own extreme feedback device (XFD). Instead, we implemented an universal feedback source: the LED bar.
You know the LED bar already from a shop window of your town. It tells you about the latest special bargain, the opening hours of the shop or just something you didn’t want to know. But you’ve read it, because it is flashing and moving. You just can’t pass that shop window without noticing the text on the LED bar.
Our LED bar sells details to us. The most important issues are already handled by the ONOZ Lamp and the Audio feedback, as both are very intrusive. The LED bar is responsible to spell the news, rather than to tell it.
A very comforting news might be “All projects sane”, which happen to be our regular state. You might be told that you rendered “project X BROKEN”, but you already know this, as the ONOZ Lamp lit up and you were the one to check in directly before. It’s better to be informed that “project X sane” was the build’s outcome. After a while, the text returns to the regular state or blanks out.
Setting up the LED bar
We aren’t the only ones out there with a LED bar on the wall. Dirk Ziegelmeier for example installed his at the same time, but blogged much earlier about it. He even gives you detailed information about the communication protocol used by the device and a C# implementation for it. The lack of protocol documentation was a bugger for us, too. We reverse engineered it independently and confirm his information. We wrote a complete Java API for the device (in our case a LSB-100R), which we might open source on request. Just drop us a note if you are interested.
Basically, we wrote an IRC bot that understands commands given to it and transforms it into API calls. The API then deals with the low-level transformation and the device handshake. This way, software modules that want to display text on the LED bar from anywhere on the internal net only need to talk on IRC.
The idea of connecting an IRC channel and the led bar isn’t unique to us, either. The F-Secure Linux Team blogged about their setup, which is disturbingly equal to ours. Kudos to you guys for being cool, too.
Effects of the LED bar
The LED bar is the perfect place to indicate project news. Its non-intrusive if you hold back those “funny” displaying effects but versatile enough to provide more than simple binary (on/off) information. Its the central place to look up to if you want to know what’s the news.
We even found out that our company logo (created by Hannafaktur) is scalable down to 7×7 pixels, which exactly fits the LED bar in height:
Try this with your company’s logo!
Read more about our Extreme Feedback Devices:
- The Code Flow-O-Meter: https://schneide.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/extreme-feedback-device-xfd-the-code-flow-o-meter/
- The ONOZ! Lamp: https://schneide.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/extreme-feedback-device-xfd-the-onoz-lamp/
- Audio Feedback: https://schneide.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/give-your-project-a-voice/
Schneide Blog 
Hello, is it possible to conect the bar to a digital radio. So it can run the text which is shown on the textbar of the radio?
It would be great fun to watch the text on the wall instead walking to the radio and try to read the small letters.