Thursday, October 14, 2010

How to make a cheap CI traffic light

We use continuous integration (CI) testing where I work, using Hudson as our CI server. I saw this recent article on the social impacts of making the CI testing status more visible and how that encourages people to fix things that are broken. One way to improve the visibility beyond just having a monitor displaying the CI server status page is to add a large traffic light displaying the status of your CI server. This is an idea I first heard of being used at Digg and have later seen at companies like Github. Below is the Hudson status setup we have at my workplace, showing both the traffic light and the monitor displaying the build status page:


Green means everything built successfully. Yellow means a build is in progress. Red means something is broken. It's a very effective way to let everyone in the office know the status of your builds and encourage people to fix them!

Believe it or not, adding a traffic light to your CI setup is simple, relatively easy, and cheap! Also, if you're like me occasionally breaking into electronics and soldering things is fun! Here's what you'll need to build your own CI traffic light:
  • Lava Lite Traffic Light from Amazon ($19.99)
  • A computer running Linux with a parallel port
  • 4-conductor wire (one for each lamp + ground)
  • A DB-25 connector
  • Soldering supplies (soldering iron, solder, desolder braid, etc)
I bought the Lava Lite Traffic Light based on some reviews from people who used it as a Toastmasters timing light (to let people know when their time speaking is up):


By default it blinks in what the box claims is a "random" pattern but is actually a fixed pattern of red, yellow, green, red, yellow, green. But after opening up the traffic light itself, which only requires a few screws, I found out it was extremely easy to modify.

By default it's controlled by a single IC which is mounted on its own daughterboard, soldered to a small control board which contains the requisite transistors and resistors for powering the lamps and switching them on and off. The first thing you'll need to do is unscrew the control board and desolder the daughterboard from it. Desolder braid is your friend here.

The next step will be following the traces from the lamps back to where the daughterboard is mounted. This is fairly straightforward as the components involved in switching the lamps on and off are in threes. Looking at the control board you should very quickly be able to identify these components. There are three larger blue resistors which limit the current going to the lamps. Don't touch those! There are three transistors which are used to turn the lamps on and off. And finally there are three smaller brown resistors... follow the traces from these resistors to where they used to attach to the daughterboard. These are at TTL voltage, which is good, because so is a parallel port. What we'll be doing is soldering wires onto these three connectors and wiring them directly into a parallel port:


I'm afraid I don't have any fancy schematics for how exactly to do this, but it shouldn't be too hard! Here's a photo of where I soldered onto the control board. You can see the slot in the lower right corner where the daughterboard for the control IC used to be. I used a green wire for the green light, red for red, white for yellow, and black for ground. The circuits that go to ground are large and well labeled, so it should be fairly straightforward to find the points to solder onto:


If you've soldered correctly, you should be able to short any of the lamp wires (or a combination thereof) with the ground wire and they should turn on.

On the other side of your wire, you'll be wanting to solder on a DB25 connector. Wire the three wires which control the lamps to data lines 0, 1, and 2, and the ground to any of the many ground pins available on a parallel port. Here's a picture of mine:


And here's a handy dandy parallel port pinout diagram:


You'll be wanting to solder onto D0, D2, D2, and probably pin 18 (ground). I put green on D0, yellow on D1, and red on D2.

Next, you'll need some software to control the traffic light over the parallel port. To control our traffic light, I wrote a simple UDP server in C that receives 1-byte packets and writes them out to the parallel port. I originally wrote the server in Ruby but garbage collection was hanging up some fun light shows I was trying to put on, so I rewrote it in C for moar realtime. Here is the C source code to the traffic light server:


This uses the /dev/port character device on Linux, so you'll either need to run this server as root or a user specifically configured to have permissions to /dev/port. One thing I soon discovered was that the parallel port is stateful and will remain in the last state you set it to. This means you don't constantly have to write to the parallel port to keep a lamp on. Instead you can just set a state and the parallel port will remain in that state. Another thing I discovered that I still can't explain is that for some reason I needed to write the same byte twice to get the light to show the appropriate state. I don't know why, but it works!

Next, you'll need a client for your traffic light server. Here's a simple one I wrote in Ruby:


Just wait until this script gets passed around the office. Believe me from experience, everyone will go nuts for the first few days playing with the traffic light. Setting the light to an individual color is all, but for a true acid test here's a script I wrote which calls the above one and will make your traffic light rave balls!


But we didn't build this traffic light just to make it rave balls, did we? No, back to business, we need to get it to show the status of the Hudson build server. Here are some examples you can go off of which we're using now. It's a hacked together collection of scripts, to be sure, but it gets the job done:


Just set your Hudson server address (and username and password, if you protect it with HTTP basic auth like we do) and you're ready to go.

With all those scripts combined and a quick cron job to periodically poll Hudson's status, the traffic light will automatically display your build status and let everyone in your office know how diligent you've been about keeping your tests passing.

Now, get to work and build your own traffic light!