Yeextreme

In the era of overwhelming digital notifications (Slack, Teams, Mobile Phones, Emails, etc) I'm a strong believer in visual and instant feedback. This is why I think Extreme Feedback Devices are essential for every development team. Especially in distributed scenarios when you have lots of teams working on the same codebase.

Yeextreme is a simple application than can transform a Xiaomi Yeelight RGB light bulb into a configurable eXtreme Feedback Device.

Why not use a simple CI server plugin

This app has some flexible ways to monitor and define color states and Continuous Integration (CI) jobs. You can:

• define time-based monitoring for different CI jobs
• have simple time-based events that display a fix color (useful for team events)
• define custom colors associated to CI jobs or events
• some plugins integrate with IFTT webhooks which sometimes are unreliable or not configurable

Configuration

Yeextreme is driven by a simple properties configuration file. The file can contain the following items:

• CI tasks: with the following syntax: task_ciServer_taskName=startTime,endTime,ciServerApiUrl

• Event tasks: with the following syntax: task_eventName=startTime,endTime,color

  • startTime and endTime are valid time of the day values in format HH:mm
  • color is a color name that must also be defined as a property (see below)
  • ciServerApiUrl is the URL that will be called by the build extractor in order to get the build status

• Custom color: with the following syntax: c_colorName=red,green,blue,brightness,pulse, where

  • red,green,blue are int with values between 0 and 255
  • brightness is also an int with values between 0 and 100
  • pulse is a boolean saying if this is a pulsing color or not; valid values are true or false

• Properties controlling different aspects:

  • yeelightIP the IP of the Yeelight light bulb
  • yeelightPort the port of the Yeelight light bulb. This makes sense only if the standard port is not used. You can usually omit this
  • maxYeeLightConnectionAttempts how many tries will the app retry in case of a fail communication with the light bulb. Default is 9
  • telnetPort the port where the app will listen for remote commands
  • secondsBetweenChecks time to pause between re-assessing the supplied tasks. Default is 15 seconds

You can find a sample configuration file in the repo: yeextreme.properties.

Reserved Colors

The following colors are reserved for the CI build status:

• RED for failed builds
• GREEN for passed builds
• BLUE for build in progress
• YELLOW for unstable builds
• ALL for signaling communication errors

These colors does not need to be defined in the properties file as they default to the corresponding real color. But you can also override each of these colors using c_ properties: c_red=r,g,b,brightness,pulse.

ALL will make the device pulse into a pinky color in order to signal a communication problem.

Task priorities

The shorter time intervals will take priority over longer time intervals. For example if you have a task configured between 10:00 and 18:00 and another one between 10:15-10:45, the later will take priority during that interval. The monitoring will resume to the initial task afterwards.

always_monitor task

You can also configure a special task called always_monitor with the following syntax: COLOR,URL. This will be checked for availability periodically and every time the URL is down the light bulb will turn into the specified color overriding any existing setup. This is very useful when you have some critical resources you want to get notified about.

Limitations

Yeextreme only works with Jenkins for now. It is essential that all CI tasks must contain jenkins as the ciServer. Otherwise the job won't be monitored.

Yeextreme only considers Time of Day ignoring day and month related information.

Pre-requisites

Yeextreme must run on the same network as the Yeelight RGB light bulb.

The Yeelight RGB light bulb must first be configured to have WiFi access (using the Yeelight app from the Play Store).

The Yeelight RGB light bulb must have LAN control enabled (using the Yeelight app from the Play Store).

You must have Java 8+ installed on the box running Yeextreme.

Remote control

There are situations when you will run Yeextreme on a remote box. You can telnet on the configured telnet port (default is 8888) and run the following commands:

• ping - if you get pong this means that the device is running healthy
• state - will return what Task is currently considered the best candidate for monitoring
• colors - will return the valid colors configured in the properties file
• reloadProps URL - will trigger a properties reload from the supplied URL. This helps reloading the properties at runtime, without restarting the application
• quit - will close the connection

Running the app

Yeextreme is built as an executable jar. Just do: ./yeelight-1.3.jar (or java -jar yeelight-1.3.jar). Check the Releases tab for latest version. Latest version here: https://github.com/ludovicianul/yeextreme/releases/download/v1.3/yeextreme-1.3.jar

Build from sources

You must first run mvn initialize in order to deploy the yapi in library in the local repo. Run a mvn clean package. It will output an executable jar in the current folder. (of course, you need Maven installed on the build box).

Thanks

• https://github.com/florian-mollin/yapi for the Yeelight Java API