Controlling the spotlights at work with Sinatra and OSC
Nic bought some spotlights the other week for work, so we could hook them up to our continuous integration server, and they would let us know using the medium of colour, when things had failed!
Before we did that, I thought I’d have a little play. Tristan and Chris having been building a fun new game (Read more via the Radio Labs blog soon) which uses nowplaying data from BBC 6 Music to power it. Knowing when a track is starting and ending is also useful, so as a bit of fun, I wrote a little Ruby script that made the spotlights behave like traffic lights:
- Green – when a track started playing
- Flashing Amber – when a track was about to finish
- Red – when the track finally finished
Photo by Tristan
To control the lights we’re using ROSC open sound control for Ruby. It’s very good, but required building to install, and the interface is nice, but not simple enough if all you’re doing is turning a light on or off and changing it’s colour. So in order to make the script even more simple, I thought I’d write a little http proxy so that your could control the lights by just going to a url. It meant even the non-programmers could have fun replicating disco lighting. The urls look like this:
http://spotlights.local/all/green http://spotlights.local/all/rgb120-12-200 http://spotlights.local/all/off http://spotlights.local/all/random
The proxy is written using Sinatra. I love Sinatra. If you thought prototyping was simple with Rails, well with Sinatra + Passenger it takes simplicity to a whole new level.
You can download the lightcontroller source from Github as normal, you’ll have to tweak a few settings for your needs. You may even find it a useful template for controlling something else.
