A running-text board displays characters and simple graphics from a stored, scheduled sequence. It is small, it consumes very little, and at 496 kilometres from our workshop it is the one product we can send by carrier and expect a local electrician to mount without us. The sections below deal with gate boards, the character height that decides the whole specification, who controls the content, outdoor construction in a windy valley, sports use, and the real running cost.
LED scrolling sign in Ajdovščina — manufacturing, installation, quote
Slovenia · 496 km from our plant in Győr
Ajdovščina runs on shifts. Fructal and Mlinotest on Tovarniška cesta, Tekstina beside them and the Pipistrel aircraft works on Goriška cesta all move several hundred people through a gate at fixed hours, and every one of those movements is a communication problem: today's line allocation, a changed canteen sitting, a safety figure, a closed car park. A single-line or small-matrix programmable board is the cheapest tool that solves it, and unlike a video wall it needs no project, no committee and no installation crew from abroad.
Message boards at a factory entrance
The shift change is the audience, and it lasts twelve minutes
A board at a works gate is read by the same people twice a day, in a compressed window, while they are walking. That defines everything about it: short messages, high contrast, a cycle brief enough to be seen in full during a thirty-second walk, and content that changes often enough to be worth looking at. A board still showing last month's safety notice trains several hundred people to ignore it permanently. The messages that work are the operational ones. Which entrance is open, where the visiting drivers should report, whether the canteen sitting has moved, how many days without a lost-time incident. Marketing language on a gate board is wasted; the audience already works there.
Character height and the reading distance it buys
Roughly 250 times the height, and no argument with it
The size of the characters determines the size of the board, and the reading distance determines the size of the characters. A useful working ratio is that text is comfortably legible at about 250 times its character height - a 6 centimetre character at some 15 metres, a 16 centimetre character at around 40. Everything else about the specification follows from that single figure. So the first question is not how large a board you want but where the reader stands. A pedestrian gate needs far less than a vehicle entrance where a driver reads while approaching. We also ask for the longest message you actually intend to display, because a board that has to abbreviate every notice into initials stops being read within a fortnight.
Scheduling, sources and who holds the password
One owner, one review slot, one place the text lives
Content is loaded over the network, from a memory stick, or from a scheduling application on an office computer, and messages can be timed to appear and expire on their own. The technology is not the difficulty. The difficulty is ownership: boards fail organisationally long before they fail electrically, because everybody can edit them and nobody is responsible for them. We therefore ask you to name one owner and one deputy before delivery, and to fix a weekly slot when the content is reviewed. Where the board is to show a live figure from another system - a production count, a queue position, an environmental reading - that is an integration task with its own scope and its own price, quoted once we know what the source system can actually export.
Outdoor board construction in a windy valley
Sealing, mounting and the load on the bracket
An outdoor unit is sealed against driven rain and against the dust that dry burja days push horizontally into every opening, and it carries an ambient light sensor so it is readable at noon and not dazzling at midnight. That is standard for any exterior board. What is specific here is the mounting: a flat board on a bracket is a small sail, and in this valley the bracket, the anchors and the substrate behind them are chosen with gust loading in mind rather than by habit. We keep exterior boards close to their supporting structure, avoid long projecting arms, and specify the fixing against the wall build-up we have actually been told about. If the board is going on cladding rather than masonry, say so at enquiry, because the fixing changes completely and so does the price.
Scoreboard and sports hall use
A different job from a notice board, and a different specification
At Športni park Pale and in the town's sports facilities the requirement is not a scrolling notice but a scoreboard: large digits, instant response to an operator's keypad, and a layout that is read from the furthest seat without being thought about. Digit height there is set by the far end of the space, and it is almost always larger than the first estimate. A hall board earns its keep outside match days too, carrying training times, cancellations and club notices during the week. If that is intended, say so at specification stage: a board built purely as a scoreboard has a fixed layout and cannot easily be repurposed for text, whereas a matrix panel does both at a small extra cost decided at the start.
Running cost, cover period and spares over 496 kilometres
Send a part, not a technician
The electricity a text board uses is negligible beside the printing and the walking it replaces, and we put the connected load in watts on the quotation so that the comparison is arithmetic rather than assertion. Over a year at a factory gate the board typically displaces more in printed notices and the labour of posting them than it costs to run several times over. Cover is agreed as twelve or twenty-four months when the order is confirmed. Spare modules and a driver go out in the same consignment as the board, so at this distance the standard repair is a part sent by carrier and fitted by your own maintenance team, usually within days. A technician travelling from Győr for a text board would cost more than the board, and we do not pretend otherwise.
