This page approaches the programmable scrolling display from the two problems that dominate it on the Slovenian coast: fitting the same information into two languages without halving its legibility, and building a rotation whose timing suits people who are moving through the space rather than standing in front of it. The hardware questions of protection, brightness and scheduling follow from those two, not the other way round.
LED scrolling sign in Koper — manufacturing, installation, quote
A scrolling text display in Koper is a timing device more than a sign. What people need to know here changes by the hour and is tied to arrivals and departures: which berth is free at Marina Koper, when the last bus leaves for Škofije, whether the market is open, which gate a haulier should use, what time a shore excursion returns. And every one of those messages has to exist twice, because this is a bilingual city and a notice that speaks only Slovenian to an audience that is half Italian and increasingly international is only doing half its job. That combination, hourly content and duplicated content, is what makes the specification here different from an inland board. The constraint is not the hardware. It is the clock and the character budget.
The bilingual character budget
Every message written twice, in the same space
Start by writing your five most frequent messages in Slovenian and in Italian and counting the characters in each. Italian renderings are commonly longer than the Slovenian by a noticeable margin, and the longest of the ten strings, not the average, determines the line length you need to buy. There are only three honest ways out of a shortfall: a longer board, a shorter way of saying the thing, or an accepted convention that some information appears in one language only. Deciding which of those you will use before ordering saves a great deal of later frustration, because a board that cannot hold the Italian version of your most important notice will be quietly resented by everyone who uses it.
Rotation timing rather than scroll speed
How long each version must stay visible
The instinct is to make the text move faster so that more fits into the same time. That is precisely wrong for a bilingual board, because a reader who arrives mid-cycle has to wait for their language to come round, and a fast scroll they cannot follow makes the wait worthless. Design the cycle instead: a dwell long enough to read comfortably, a predictable order so that a regular user learns when their version appears, and a total cycle short enough that nobody has to stand and wait. A cycle over about twenty seconds loses people walking past; under about eight it becomes unreadable in two languages. Most working boards we have set up here sit between those figures.
Messages worth showing on the waterfront and at the gates
Content with a consequence
The information that justifies a changeable board is information that costs the reader something if it is wrong or absent. At the marina that is berth and office hours and weather advisories. At a haulage or port-adjacent gate it is the queue arrangement, the document required and the lane in use, which changes with traffic and is the classic case where a board saves a great many pointless conversations at a window. In the streets around Titov trg it is opening hours, market days and event times for an audience that is largely unfamiliar with the city. What does not belong on a scrolling board anywhere is a slogan, which never changes and therefore should have been printed.
Salt aerosol on a small strip
Protection, position and the fixings
A small board is not a small engineering problem on this coast. Exterior units are IP65, and to that we add stainless fixings, an enclosure and bracket specified for a marine atmosphere, and a mounting position chosen to keep the unit out of direct spray where the building allows. A board on a seafront elevation should be rinsed with fresh water when the windows are cleaned; the visible symptom of neglect is a dull, low-contrast face rather than a failure, and it appears gradually enough that people stop noticing their own board. Where the unit can be mounted inside glazing instead, that solves the corrosion question entirely at the cost of a narrower viewing angle.
The scheduling method and the season
Loading a calendar rather than typing daily
The controller holds a list of messages with start and end dates, which suits a coastal business whose year has clearly defined phases. Summer hours, shoulder-season hours and winter hours can all be entered once in spring, each with the dates on which they take over, and the board then changes itself on the right morning without anyone remembering to do it. Content reaches the board over the network, over Wi-Fi so that no data cable has to be run to the mounting position, or from a USB stick where a network connection is not available. For a board where the content is genuinely live rather than scheduled, an HDMI feed from a small computer is the route we use instead.
Spares, warranty and a 515-kilometre service call
Built so the distance rarely matters
Koper is 515 road kilometres from our workshop in Győr, the longest run in our Slovenian coverage, so these boards are built on the assumption that we will not be on site quickly. Reserve modules from the same production batch are delivered with the board, the construction allows a local electrician to exchange one under telephone guidance, and the power supply sits where it can be reached without opening the display face. The warranty is one or two years depending on the specification and the exposure. Where a visit really is required, travel and the crew's daily allowance are quoted as separate lines, as they are on every foreign job we take.
