Build status hardware

We have been using Teamcity for some time for the Continous Integration in the project. Now we want to have some kind of hardware in the room that shows everyone that a build was broken. I've seen mentions to lava lamps and rabbits that can do this, bu开发者_StackOverflowt couldn't see any examples for Teamcity.

Does anyone have a good suggestion on what to buy and how to integrate with Teamcity?

Thanks

---

Teamcity has a buildbunny plugin for for integration with a Nabaztag (I wouldn't have recommended a Nabaztag some time ago but they are saved now).

alt text http://www.agimatec.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/nabaztag-speech.jpg

If you are a team of Linux geeks, you may prefer the tux droid plugin.

_{(source: waltercedric.com)}

Or maybe you could just use a computer display with the team-piazza plugin (for something "a la" mozilla, see http://isthetreegreen.com/)

alt text http://team-piazza.googlecode.com/svn/wiki/screenshot-success.png

For everything else (lava lamps, ambient orb, build wallboard, LCD monitor, etc), I guess you'll need some hacking. I'd like to see lava lamp support as this is my preferred extreme feedback device (it's funny to race against the wax to fix the build). So if you go this way, let me know :)

---

Maybe you could try an Ambient Orb as suggested by this article.

_{(source: ambientdevices.com)}

---

Check out a tool called Cradiator (http://cradiator.codeplex.com). We use this in my dev room to give visual and audio notifications on builds.

We have just moved to TeamCity and we used Cradiator with CCnet. So I have just put together a plugin for TeamCity that generates the correct XML of build status that Cradiator needs to function.

This plugin should be available bundled with Cradiator in the next week or so as I am in contact with the author.

I'll post back here when it is.

---

Another option for a device - even though it is more on a per developer machine than room basis due to its size - might be a blink(1) USB device.

---

Another option for a device might be a http://www.futurocube.com/ game cube. I already had one, and if your have the SDK installed, it shows up as a COM port that you can connect and send simple commands to to turn on LEDs and even play sounds. If Teamcity allows (starting apps that do) connecting to a COM port to send commands then you might be able to use that. My own build status tool (for TFS, not open yet) does this, and combined with playing some sounds this gives a nice status device for not too large rooms, like ours.