How to have a (physical) light with the status of the continuous build?

Question

Having this would be great: a light (a LED, or even just a bulb) that is green/yellow/red depending on the status of the build. If the latest build of your continuous integration failed because of a compile error, it shows red; if the reason was a failed test it's yellow; otherwise is green and everyone is happy.

So, this light needs to be connected to a computer, which checks the status of your solution for continuous integration (Atlassian's Bamboo in my case, but you name it), and chooses the color. Now that makes for great (and geeky) office decoration!

Any ideas on how to put in place such a system in a reasonable time/price frame?

(My apologies if this is somewhat off-topic in stackoverflow, but I believe this is the best community to answer this question, and benefits from its answer!)

Answer 1

Here's another link to show how to do it with Lava lamps:

http://weblogs.asp.net/lorenh/archive/2004/08/27/221471.aspx

Answer 2

Misuse LEDs in the wanted colors and an old computer with a parallel port for it. Then set ports on the parallel port to on/off using Parapin. The hardware part is as easy as pushing the cables in the ports.

Actually, I already did that myself, just stuffed the LED into the parallel port and it worked.