What follows is about programmable text displays for Domžale addresses, written around the problem of repetition rather than around the hardware. We cover how a rotation is built for an audience that has already read it, how long a line can usefully be, where the board should sit on a route people take habitually, who decides that a message has expired, and what a service call costs at 396 kilometres. The technical decisions are simpler than most buyers expect; the editorial ones are harder.
LED scrolling sign in Domžale — manufacturing, installation, quote
A scrolling text board in Domžale has an audience that almost no other product has to think about: the same people, over and over. In a town where a large share of residents leave for Ljubljana in the morning and return along the same road at night, a board on Ljubljanska cesta is read by broadly the same several thousand pairs of eyes twice a day, five days a week. That is around four hundred passes a year per person. A message that works brilliantly on first sight and is still there in March has stopped being information and become part of the wallpaper.
An audience that has already read it
The half life of a line of text
Assume that anybody who passes your premises daily absorbs a new message within two exposures and stops seeing it entirely by the tenth. In practical terms a line has a useful life of about a working week for a commuter audience, and rather longer for a board facing a car park that people use occasionally. This is the single figure that should drive the purchase. If nobody in the organisation is going to touch the board weekly, a printed sign is cheaper, more legible and more honest, and we would rather say so before the order than afterwards.
A rotation built for repetition
A small library, rather than a single sentence
The workable structure is a set of eight or ten short items held in the controller, of which three or four are shown in any given week, rotating on a schedule. Two of them are permanent anchors, such as opening hours or a telephone number, and the rest change. Because the items are prepared in advance and dated, nobody has to invent something on a Monday morning, and the board never sits on the same sentence for a month. The scheduling is loaded over the building Wi-Fi or from a USB stick, so putting the week in place takes minutes.
The line that survives a second reading
Character count, letter height and Slovenian diacritics
Letter height comes from the number of pixel rows the strip has, and that is fixed by how many 16 centimetre module rows you buy. A single row gives a modest character height suited to reading from a few metres; two rows allow a genuinely legible line from across a carriageway. Count the characters of your longest real message, including spaces and including the carons on š, č and ž, which need clear space above the capitals if they are not to be lost. If the message does not fit, shorten the message rather than shrinking the type.
Position on a route taken twice a day
Where the traffic is already slow
The board earns its keep where the reader is stationary or nearly so: at a junction where cars queue on Ljubljanska cesta, beside a pedestrian crossing near Češminov park, at the entrance to a car park, at a gate where a shift arrives at Količevo. A board on a free flowing stretch is read by nobody, however bright it is. Behind glass in a shop window it is protected from weather but must be angled against reflections from the street lighting opposite; on the outside of the building it needs the IP65 construction and a considered cable entry. Both are legitimate, and they cost differently.
The person who retires a message
One owner, one deputy, one calendar entry
Text boards do not fail technically nearly as often as they fail editorially. The common ending is a display still announcing an event that happened in the autumn. The fix is administrative: one named person owns the board, a second person holds the access as deputy, and there is a recurring reminder in a shared calendar on the same weekday. We set both accounts up during the handover, write the login and the schedule on a single sheet, and leave it with the board rather than emailing it to whoever signed the order.
Service, spares and the 396 kilometre question
What you can do without us
Almost everything that goes wrong with a text strip is either a module or a power supply, and both are swapped with a screwdriver. That is why the delivery includes spare modules from the same batch and why the handover covers the swap procedure with your own maintenance person. Warranty runs one or two years depending on construction. If a fault does need a vehicle, the travel and the per diem are itemised separately in the offer rather than absorbed into a service charge, and we will always try the remote checks first.
