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by joshvm 374 days ago
These do exist but they're remarkably expensive and the infrastructure is apparently terrible. Several companies sell "smart led displays" that people use to show their follower counts while streaming. There's no reason you couldn't make one and have it subscribe to ntfy or something like that. But adoption seems ropey because the use cases are always clocks and $200 for a screen is a big ask for most people.

See the "tidybyt" https://www.theverge.com/23303371/tidbyt-review-desk-accesso...

There are anecdotes about offices having a "build status" LED and you would get shamed if your commit broke the CI.
2 comments
eichin 374 days ago
We had a "smart display" that was a wall-projector that someone was throwing out, a raspi zero and some python code that used SDL to display some numbers (in a huge font) from a requests fetch of a csv file. Once we moved out of incubator space and into a real office, we duplicated it so that it was visible in more places (at the time, terribly under-spec projectors were $150ish and melted/burned within a year of 24/7 operation; after a couple of iterations of that we'd grown enough to have an actual analytics team that got a big screen and a dashboard up in the kitchen - but noone really looked at it, the thing about the projector version was that it had One Big Number that Went Up and so it was easy to care about.)

Since it was widely visible it occasionally got augmented with "N days to <critical deadline>", usually conference appearances.

Also, originally it was unfunded (free raspis, trashpicked projectors) but when it first went away due to projector meltdown, the legendarily cheap CEO showed up with a replacement, because he really liked having The Number on display.

(Didn't have build status, but it did change from green to red on certain kinds of infrastructure failure, which wasn't as useful as it sounds.)

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fidotron 374 days ago
> the infrastructure is apparently terrible

This is unsurprising. LED displays/arrays/strips involve using enough power that a software specialist is unlikely to manage it safely without getting decent at electronics. Conversely, the hardware people can throw just enough software together to make the happy path work, but not scale it up let alone reliably.

There are some people genuinely superb at both domains, but at some point they sucked at one or the other. The trick is to be ready to absorb information from both sides, but many will simply go "hey, it works on the happy path" and move on. My personal cutoff is whenever it goes over 12v or 500mA I know I'll be getting a second opinion.

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