This page treats the running-text board as what it is, a practical instrument rather than a display. It goes through the decisions in the order they matter: what the board should carry, how big the characters must be for the distance involved, where it should be mounted, how the text gets to it, and what to keep on the shelf so that a fault does not mean waiting for a van.
LED scrolling sign in Križevci — manufacturing, installation, quote
Križevci is a place where a lot of people are moving to a timetable. Trains on the Zagreb line and the Bjelovar branch set the rhythm at the station end of town, students and staff come and go at the agricultural college, and the market and the shops around Trg Josipa Jurja Strossmayera work to their own weekly pattern. Timetables change, duty rotas rotate, a lecture room moves, a delivery is late, the June festival programme runs to the minute for three days. A running-text board exists for exactly this class of information: a line that has to be right today and different tomorrow, and that nobody wants to reprint each time it changes.
Write down the messages before you buy the board
The longest real message decides the specification
List the ten lines you would actually display in a normal month, including the longest one, before anyone quotes you a board. That list determines the character count, and with it the physical length of the unit. Clients who skip this step end up with a board that shows their routine notice comfortably and truncates the one announcement that mattered, which then gets abbreviated into something nobody understands. It takes twenty minutes and it is the single most useful piece of preparation for this product.
Pace out the reading distance and size the characters to it
Height first, then how many characters fit
Stand where the reader will be, whether that is the far pavement, a platform, a queue or a stopped car, and measure. Character height is what makes text legible, and a ten centimetre character remains comfortable to roughly thirty or forty metres in normal daylight, less when the sun is low and behind the board. Fix the height for that distance, then work out how many characters the available width allows, and check the result against the message list from the previous step. Doing this in the reverse order is how a board ends up unreadable from the place it was bought to serve.
Pick the colour depth on evidence, not on impulse
Amber, two-colour or full colour, at three quite different prices
Amber or red on a single-colour board gives the most legibility per euro and is entirely sufficient for text. A second colour lets one line be flagged as urgent, which is genuinely useful for a duty rota or a service disruption. Full colour turns the board into a small video display and multiplies the cost; take it only if there is a real intention to show graphics, and be honest about whether anyone will produce them. We quote the options side by side so the comparison is made on figures.
Choose the mounting position and accept its consequences
Behind glass is cheap, on the wall is visible
A board inside the window avoids weather sealing, external cabling and a facade fixing altogether, and on an older building that is worth a great deal. It has to be set back from the pane and kept out of direct sun, or reflection wins and the passer-by reads the street. A board on the elevation is sealed, brighter, readable at an angle and effective from across the road, but it involves anchors into the building, a weather-sealed cable entry and, on a protected frontage, a conversation about what may be fixed there.
Load a schedule instead of retyping the same lines
A month at a time, over Wi-Fi, from a phone
The controller joins the local network wirelessly, so nothing has to be cabled to the board beyond its power. Ad hoc lines are typed on a phone and appear in seconds. Anything that repeats, such as a duty rota, term-time opening hours or a set of messages that vary by day and hour, should be loaded once as a schedule and then left alone. Where there is no usable network, content can be carried on a memory stick, which suits an installation updated only a handful of times a year.
Keep the two spare parts on site and forget about us
279 kilometres is close, but a shelf is closer
Failures on this product are uncommon and are nearly always a power supply or a single module. Both travel with the board as spares, and we show two of your people how to change them at handover, which converts the usual fault from a service call into a ten-minute job by someone already on the premises. When a real service visit is needed, the 279 kilometres mean a technician arrives and leaves the same day rather than an expedition being planned. The warranty runs one or two years depending on the build, and the spares stay with you regardless.
