Betterplace.org site activity notifier

While working at betterplace.org, I built a real time site activity monitor for our break room that displayed every time an interesting event happened on the site, eg: a new donation, a new user registering, users asking questions and projects answering them.

behind the scenes, it was powered by the backend rails server sending push notifications on every noteworthy http action, which was then consumed by a laptop using a serial control to the arduino to tell it which led to switch on.