The Deployatron

‘The Deployatron’ is a hardware hack-day project of a peripheral button used to map a physical action to live software deployments and explore how our software deployments could be more of an event.

The Deployatron is an exploration into the process of releasing software and is designed to create an event rather than just clicking a button on a web page to deploy to live. It is built from an Arduino Mini Pro, a USB serial adapter, physical button and switch and feedback is through a small speaker and NeoPixel digitally-addressable LEDs. The style of the unit is inspired by my love of atomic-age retro-futuristic, ‘atompunk’, design.

With the large flip-up swich, the unit can be ‘armed’ which means the deploy button becomes live. As the unit is starting up, the LEDs ‘warm up’ until the unit is armed, at which point you get green lights ‘across the board’. Pressing the ‘deploy’ button will then trigger the unit. The Deployatron sends signals using serial communications over the USB cable of ‘ARMED’ and ‘DEPLOY’ to signal readyness and trigger an action on the connected machine. We are using The Deployatron to trigger a ‘premote to live’ of the currect version on our staging environment.

The project on Github:

github.com/betandr/deployatron

Arming The Deployatron

Deploying

Serial Communications from The Deployatron

The Internal Workings