These boards display characters and simple graphics from a scheduled sequence stored on the unit. They are cheap to buy, almost free to run, and light enough that at 384 kilometres we send them by carrier and a local tradesman mounts them. What follows is the practical order of decisions: choose the board by how often the message changes, size the characters from the reader's position, name an owner for the content, specify honestly for the position, put it where the same people pass, and add up the real cost.
LED scrolling sign in Litija — manufacturing, installation, quote
Slovenia · 384 km from our plant in Győr
A programmable text board is the right size of technology for Litija. The station forecourt needs to tell people about a replacement bus; the municipality has notices to put in front of the public near Trg na stavbah; the Sitarjevec mine, which now runs guided tours through the old workings above the town, has opening times that change with the season and the weather; the sports hall on Bevkova has training times that shift every term; and the neighbouring parish centre at Šmartno pri Litiji has an events list that nobody wants to reprint. All of that is text that changes, and none of it needs a video wall.
Pick the board by how often the message changes
The threshold is roughly once a month
There is a simple test for whether one of these is worth buying. If the notice changes more often than about once a month, the board pays for itself against printing, laminating and the twenty minutes somebody spends walking out with tape. If it changes twice a year, print is cheaper and always will be. Seasonal opening times, a guided tour that only runs when the ground is dry enough, a training schedule that moves each term, a temporary road closure, a duty rota: these are the classic cases and they are all the same shape - short text, frequent change, a captive local readership. What a running-text board does not do is build an identity. If what you want is your name lit up above a door, that is a sign, and it is a different purchase.
Size the characters from where the reader stands
About 250 times the character height, and the board follows from that
Text is comfortably legible at roughly 250 times its character height. A 4 centimetre character reads at about 10 metres, an 8 centimetre character at about 20, a 15 centimetre character at nearly 40. Fix the reading distance first and the character height, the board size and the price all fall out of it in that order. Then ask how long your longest real message is, not your shortest. A board that can show eight characters at a time will abbreviate everything into something nobody bothers to decode, and within a month it is decoration. It is usually cheaper to buy a three-line matrix once than to buy a single-line unit twice, and we would rather have that conversation before the order than afterwards.
Name one person who owns the text
The password, the deputy and the weekly slot
Messages reach the board over the local network, from a memory stick, or from a small scheduling application on an office computer, and each item can be given a start and an end date so that it disappears by itself. The technical side takes an afternoon to learn. The part that decides whether the installation succeeds is administrative. Name one owner and one deputy, keep the password somewhere sensible, and put a recurring fifteen minutes in a diary each week to review what is showing. Boards in public institutions die of neglect, not of component failure: the moment a board shows something out of date, the audience stops reading it, and it is very hard to win them back.
Specify for the position honestly, including the awkward ones
Under a canopy is outdoors, whatever the drawing says
An outdoor board is a different build: sealed against driven rain, much brighter so it stays readable in daylight, fitted with an ambient sensor so it dims itself in the evening, and heavier, which changes the bracket. An indoor board in a heated foyer can be far simpler and cheaper, and there it is the correct choice. The trap is the position in between. A board in an unheated entrance hall, behind a glazed porch, under a canopy on a forecourt, or in a passage open at one end is exposed to condensation even where rain never reaches it, and in a river valley that holds damp air this is the normal failure. Describe the position to us as it really is and we will specify it as an exterior unit, which costs a little more once instead of a replacement later.
Put it where the same people pass every day
Stations, gates, school doors and hall entrances
These boards reward repetition rather than volume. A position with a few hundred daily passers-by who are the same few hundred people is worth more than a busier one full of strangers, because the audience learns to check it. The station forecourt, a works gate, a school entrance, the door of a sports hall and the front of a public building are the five positions that work almost everywhere, and they work here for the same reason. That also explains why a text board and a large display rarely compete for the same money. One serves a small, returning audience with information that changes; the other serves a large, passing audience with something to look at. Buying the second when you needed the first is the more expensive mistake of the two.
Add up the running cost honestly
Watts on the quotation, a spare in the box, cover in writing
A strip of characters lit for part of the day consumes very little, and we put the connected load in watts on the quotation so that you can put a real figure into your own calculation instead of accepting a claim. Against the print, the laminating pouches and the staff time it replaces, the electricity is not the number that decides anything. The cover period is twelve or twenty-four months, agreed when the order is confirmed rather than left vague. Spare modules and a power supply travel in the same consignment as the board, so a fault at this distance is normally a component sent by carrier and fitted locally within a few days. Sending a technician 384 kilometres to a text board would cost more than the board itself, and we would rather build the product so that it never has to happen.
