Raph Terrier Turns an LED Artwork Into an At-A-Glance Build Monitor Through the Power of Webhooks

Developer Raph Terrier has turned what was originally intended to be a little bit of artwork for the office wall into a handy status display for a build pipeline — by triggering an LED matrix based on webhook events.

"This side project began as many do: with a gadget collecting dust in a drawer," Terrier explains. "After joining Render in August and spending many of my workdays on video content, I had the idea to repurpose an old LED panel as a background accent for demos and calls. I laser‑cut a Render logo plate, attached it to the panel, and made it glow. Folks seemed to like it! One teammate suggested we could take it a step further by connecting it to Render’s webhooks: 'Whoa, I wonder if you could hook up a Wi-Fi controller and have it change colors on builds and deploys in a workspace.' Of course, I had to give it a go."

The glowing artwork was built around an unspecified Raspberry Pi Pico W-powered RGB LED matrix, which in its original incarnation simply animated through its color space. As the hardware included a Wi-Fi radio, though, it was ideally-suited for connection to the network as a status display — in this case, monitoring a build pipeline using the webhooks provided as part of Terrier's employer's platform.

"Render's webhooks made this straightforward," Terrier says. "The device listens for four events (build_started, build_ended, deploy_started, deploy_ended) and maps each to a distinct gradient and animation on the 32×32 panel. It turns remote build and deploy activity into something you can see across the room, without having to check a dashboard tab. The result: deploys get waves, builds get pulses, and completions flash quickly so you can see them at a glance." The only wrinkle: Render's webhooks require an encrypted HTTPS connection, while the microcontroller side was only set up to handle plain-text HTTP — requiring a proxy server to handle translation between the two.

The full project write-up is available on the Render blog.