Office Dashboard

A split-flap board in the office works as an information radiator --- a passive, always-visible display that keeps the team aligned without requiring anyone to open a browser or check Slack. Mount it near the team area and let critical updates flip into view throughout the day.

Hardware setup

An iPad on a desk stand works well for small teams. For larger spaces, an Apple TV driving a wall-mounted monitor is more visible and can run continuously without interruption.

Source What to display Example
RSS Internal blog, status page, or incident feed https://status.yourcompany.com/feed.rss
MQTT CI/CD pipeline results, monitoring alerts Build passed/failed messages from Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI
Calendar Meeting room schedules, team standups A shared team calendar via iCloud or CalDAV
Push Notifications Deployment events, on-call alerts Webhooks triggered by your deployment pipeline
Weather Local conditions for the office location Useful for teams that commute or travel

RSS for team updates

RSS is the simplest way to pipe structured information into the board. Many tools you already use expose RSS feeds:

  • Status pages (Statuspage, Instatus, Cachet) publish incident feeds.
  • Internal blogs (Confluence, Notion, Ghost) offer RSS endpoints.
  • GitHub Releases for key repositories --- append .atom to the releases URL (e.g., https://github.com/org/repo/releases.atom).
  • Reddit subreddits relevant to your stack --- append .rss to any subreddit URL.

MQTT for CI/CD and monitoring

MQTT is the most flexible way to push real-time events to the board. Your build system or monitoring tool publishes a JSON message to a topic, and Arrivals displays it immediately.

Example: CI/CD pipeline

{
  "sender": "GitHub Actions",
  "text": "main — BUILD PASSED — deploy-api #487",
  "indicatorColor": "#00FF00"
}

{
  "sender": "GitHub Actions",
  "text": "main — BUILD FAILED — deploy-api #488",
  "indicatorColor": "#FF0000"
}

Example: Monitoring alert

{
  "sender": "Grafana",
  "text": "CPU > 90% ON PROD-WEB-03 — ALERT FIRING",
  "indicatorColor": "#FF8800"
}

See the MQTT source documentation for broker configuration details.

Calendar for meeting rooms

Connect a shared calendar to display upcoming meetings on the board. This is especially useful mounted outside a conference room.

Setting Recommended value Why
Lookahead Window 4 hours Shows the next few meetings without cluttering the queue
Calendars Select only the relevant room calendar Avoids mixing personal and room events
Display Duration 30--45 seconds Gives people enough time to read meeting details

Push notifications for deployments

Configure your deployment pipeline to send a webhook to Arrivals when a deploy completes. This gives the team instant, passive awareness of what shipped and when.

See Push Notifications and the REST API for integration details.

Setting Value Why
Keep Screen Awake On The board should always be visible during work hours
Show Settings Button Off Prevents accidental changes from curious passersby
Flip Speed Medium Fast enough to feel responsive, slow enough to read
Sound Off Open offices are noisy enough
Display Duration 20--30 seconds Balances readability with throughput
Long Messages Complete Ensures no critical detail is truncated

Tips

  • Color-code with indicator lamps. Use green for successful builds, red for failures, amber for warnings, and blue for informational messages. The indicator color is visible at a glance from across the room.
  • Deduplicate aggressively. If multiple sources might report the same event (e.g., an incident appears in both RSS and MQTT), Arrivals deduplicates by content so it only displays once.
  • Schedule quiet hours. Use a Shortcut to disable high-frequency sources outside work hours so the board is not cycling through stale alerts overnight.