This page treats a programmable text display as an operational instrument rather than an advertisement. It covers which of your messages are worth automating, how the board is kept in agreement with your other channels, how a wrong line is corrected from 916 kilometres away, what character height the pavement in front of you dictates, what the board should show when it has nothing to say, and how the unit is serviced at this distance.
LED scrolling sign in Dubrovnik — manufacturing, installation, quote
Croatia · 916 km from our plant in Győr
A scrolling text board in Dubrovnik nearly always ends up carrying information with a consequence attached. It is the last thing a passenger reads before a boat leaves Gruž, the notice that tells a queue at the Pile Gate how long the wait for the City Walls actually is, the panel at a Lapad reception that gives the time of the airport transfer, the strip in a pharmacy window that says which branch is open tonight. Nobody in this city buys a text board to be decorative. They buy it because a printed sheet taped to a door cannot be corrected at seven in the evening, and because the cost of a wrong time here is a missed transfer, not a missed impression.
Messages that cost something when they are wrong
Sorting your content before choosing hardware
Write down every line you expect the board to display and mark the ones that a customer would act on: departure times, waiting times, opening and closing, prices, the fact that you have moved. Those are the messages that justify the purchase, and they are also the ones that set the requirements - reliable scheduling, quick correction, an unambiguous typeface. Everything else on your list is promotional and could equally be printed. Clients who do this exercise before the order usually end up with a smaller, cheaper board than they first imagined, positioned where the consequential audience actually stands.
One version of the truth
When the board, the door and the website disagree
The failure we see most often has nothing to do with electronics. A business changes its hours, updates the website, forgets the board, and now has two contradictory statements in public with its own name on both. The remedy is procedural: decide which channel is authoritative, put the board in the same routine as the others, and give the person who edits one the ability to edit them all. We record that arrangement in the handover sheet with names against it, because a board maintained by nobody in particular is maintained by nobody at all.
Correcting a line from 916 kilometres
Wi-Fi, network cable and a stick in a drawer
Text reaches the board three ways. Over Wi-Fi, which is how most Dubrovnik units are set up, because it saves pulling a cable through a finished ceiling to reach a window position. Over a UTP lead where a socket is already there and the building's network is stable. Or from a USB stick, which is the method that still works when the router does not. We deliberately commission every board so that all three routes function and are tested in front of you, and we ask you to correct a message yourself while we are still standing there. That is the difference between owning the board and depending on us.
Character height and the width of the pavement
Sizing from the reader's position, not the wall's
Legibility follows a simple relation: the further away the reader, the taller the character, and the taller the character, the fewer of them fit on a line. Someone standing two metres from a shop window in the lanes above the Placa reads small text comfortably; a passenger reading across the width of the road at the Gruž terminal does not. Because the tiles come in fixed steps of 32 by 16 centimetres, the practical decision is between one generous line and two cramped ones, and one line almost always wins. Count the characters in your longest genuine message, including the diacritics, before you decide the board's length.
The dark board and the wrong board
What is displayed when there is nothing to display
A board that has run out of scheduled content should go blank, not loop yesterday's message. We treat the failure state as part of the specification: what appears after a power cut, what appears when the schedule expires, and what appears if the source is unreachable. In a city where the board may be announcing a departure, showing an out-of-date time is worse than showing nothing. The board's restart behaviour is set at commissioning and written down, along with the surge protection on the supply, because summer storms on this coast take out more small electronics than any other cause.
Spares on your shelf, service at a distance
Why almost no fault needs a vehicle from Győr
Text boards are simple, which is their great advantage at this distance. The shipment includes reserve tiles from the same batch and a spare power supply, so the commonest faults are fixed on site by a local electrician in under an hour. Where the problem is configuration rather than hardware, we work through it remotely with whoever holds the access. The warranty runs one or two years by agreement, and the offer shows the travel and per diem separately in the rare case that somebody genuinely has to make the 916-kilometre journey - so you always know what a call-out would cost before you need one.
