We build programmable text boards: one- or multi-line LED panels for indoors and out, updated over a network, over Wi-Fi or from a memory stick. They cost a fraction of a video wall and they do a job a video wall does poorly - carrying short factual messages that change every day. This page covers how we size, mount and hand them over for use in Kočevje, 467 kilometres from our workshop.
LED scrolling sign in Kočevje — manufacturing, installation, quote
In a municipality of 563.7 square kilometres with villages scattered across it, information travels badly. Somebody who drives into Kočevje twice a week will not read a municipal website, but they will read a line of text on the way past - and since passenger trains returned to the Grosuplje branch in 2021, after an interruption of more than fifty years, there is once again a station platform where people stand and wait with nothing to look at. A running-text board is the cheapest instrument we make, and in a dispersed rural municipality it is frequently the most useful one.
What can a line of text do that a municipal website cannot?
Reaching people who are already outside
A website waits to be visited. A board at the roadside intercepts somebody who is already on their way somewhere else, which in a territory of this size is the harder half of the problem: the person from an outlying hamlet who comes into town on a Thursday is not going to check a page for the collection day, the closure or the surgery hours, but will absolutely read eight words on the way past. That is the honest use case, and it is narrow. If your message needs a paragraph, a board is the wrong medium and a letter is the right one. If it fits in a phrase and changes weekly, nothing else we make is remotely as cost-effective.
How large must the characters be at a works gate?
Sizing for vehicles that are slowing down
The useful distinction is between readers who have stopped and readers who have not. At a works entrance of the kind found on Tomšičeva cesta, where a vehicle is already braking for a barrier, characters of ten to twelve centimetres are read without difficulty. On an open approach such as Ljubljanska cesta, where nothing is slowing anybody down, the same notice needs sixteen centimetres or more and half the words. We work from the longest notice you genuinely expect to display. Tell us that sentence and the point at which it must be legible, and the board width follows arithmetically - which is much better than buying a narrow board and then abbreviating every message for the rest of its life.
Is one board enough for a municipality this size?
One large display against several small ones
Spread over 563.7 square kilometres, a single impressive board at the centre reaches the people who were coming anyway. Three modest boards at the points where the outlying roads meet the town do something different, and usually cost less in total than the one large unit. The planning question is therefore not what size to buy but where the decision points are. We will happily quote a single position, but if the aim is to inform a dispersed population we would rather map the entry routes with you first and put the budget where the vehicles actually pause.
Will it survive a winter at the edge of the forest?
Cold, damp and the load on the bracket
The electronics in an outdoor-class board are sealed and rated for temperatures well below anything this region produces; that part is not the risk. The risks are mechanical and they are local: ice loading on a bracket, damp air off Rudniško jezero and the timber of the Rog finding a cable gland that was fitted in a hurry, and a gust catching a face-on board on an exposed approach. So we specify the mounting to the position rather than issuing a standard bracket, and we state the fixing loads on the drawing so that whoever installs it can see what is being asked of the wall. Downward-facing glands and a drip loop cost nothing and prevent most of the faults we are ever called about.
Who is going to change it in five years?
Handover to two people, in writing
Updates go over a network connection or over Wi-Fi, so no cable has to be pulled to the board, and the interface is deliberately dull: a text field, a duration, a save button. Anyone who can send an email can operate it, and messages sit in a schedule so that routine notices need no attention at all. We hand over to two named people rather than one, with printed credentials and a single sheet of instructions, and we keep a copy of both. The commonest reason a board in a small organisation stops being useful is that the person who knew the password has moved on - and at 467 kilometres, that ought to be solved by an email rather than by a vehicle. The term on a board is one or two years, with replacement modules included in the shipment.
What arrives, and what does the road cost?
Consignment, local fitting, itemised travel
A board is light enough to travel as an ordinary consignment and to be hung by a local electrician working from our fixing drawing. For a good share of orders that is exactly what happens: no journey takes place, and consequently no journey appears on the invoice. Where you would rather we came and commissioned it, the trip and the crew's hours are listed as their own entries with the distance shown, kept apart from the price of the goods. We ask for photographs, dimensions and your wording; those serve this order and nothing else, and after handover we hold no access to what the board shows.
