This page approaches a programmable text display as a way of removing repeated verbal enquiries from your staff, which is where the return on one usually comes from in a town like this. It covers how to identify the question worth displaying, how to word an answer that stops the enquiry rather than prompting a follow-up, what happens on the day the answer changes, where the board has to be so that people read it before they ask, and what the whole arrangement demands of the hardware.
LED scrolling sign in Kamnik — manufacturing, installation, quote
In Kamnik a scrolling text board most often pays for itself by answering a question that somebody is currently answering out loud. Is the Velika planina cable car running today. What time does the Arboretum close in October. Is the Bistrica valley road open. When is the next bus to Ljubljana. Reception desks, information points, shop counters and hotel front desks in this town give the same handful of answers dozens of times a day, and every one of them interrupts whatever the person was doing. A text display is worth buying here when it can take one of those questions off a human being permanently, and it is worth nothing at all if it cannot.
Which question is your counter answering forty times a day?
Count it for a week before you specify anything
Ask whoever is on the desk to keep a tally sheet for one ordinary week: one mark per question, grouped roughly. Almost every desk in Kamnik discovers two or three questions that dominate everything else, and they are rarely the ones management expects. Opening hours, whether something is running today, where to park, and how long the walk takes account for most of it. That tally is the specification. It tells you how many messages the board needs to carry, how often they change, and whether the value is real or imagined, and it costs nothing but a sheet of paper.
Can the answer be written so it ends the conversation?
An answer that prompts a second question has failed
This is harder than it sounds. Displaying the words closed today invites somebody to come in and ask when it reopens; displaying reopening Saturday at nine does not. A time without a date is ambiguous by the second sentence. A message that says see reception has simply moved the interruption two metres. Write each line as though the reader will act on it without speaking to anybody, then test it on a colleague who does not already know the answer. Most boards that disappoint their owners disappoint them here, at the wording, and not in the hardware.
Who changes it on the morning the answer changes?
One named person, one deputy, and a route in that works from home
A board answering a question about today is only useful if it is right about today. That means somebody has to be able to change it early, possibly before they arrive, and somebody else has to be able to do it when the first person is on holiday. Name both, write the credentials on one sheet and keep it with the board rather than in one person's head. The connection matters here too: over Wi-Fi or the building network the message can be changed from a phone, whereas a board that only accepts a USB stick requires a person to physically walk to it, which is exactly the interruption you were trying to remove.
Where does it have to be to intercept the question?
Before the desk, not beside it
A display mounted behind the counter is read after the question has been asked, which achieves nothing. It has to be where somebody is already looking while they are deciding to ask: at the door, above the entrance, in the queue, at the point where a path splits. On a shop front on Šutna that means in the window at head height rather than high on the frontage; at a visitor point it means facing the car park rather than the building. Walk the approach yourself and stop where you would first want to know the answer. That is the position, and it is worth more than an extra metre of board length.
What does that use imply for the hardware?
Length, character height and where the board actually sits
Answering a live question puts different demands on a board than advertising does. The messages are short, so length matters less than legibility; they change daily, so the connection matters more than the resolution; and they are usually read from a few metres, so a modest character height is enough. The strip is built from the same landscape tiles as everything else we make, 32 centimetres wide and 16 tall, so its length and its character height both move in fixed steps rather than continuously. Indoors we set 700 to 800 nits and then dim further; behind glass facing the street, the enemy is reflection rather than weather, which is a positioning problem rather than a brightness one.
What does it cost to keep one working from 398 kilometres away?
Spares in a drawer, remote diagnosis, a local electrician
Very little, provided the delivery was specified properly. Spare tiles and a spare power supply ship with the board, the wiring is labelled, and faults are diagnosed over the same connection used to send the messages. In practice that means a competent local electrician resolves nearly everything, and the distance between Kamnik and our works becomes a line on the original invoice rather than a recurring problem. Warranty runs to one or two years depending on the configuration; the thing that genuinely costs you every month is somebody's ten minutes to keep the text true.
