This page treats a scrolling text display as something to be proven rather than admired. It sets out the checks worth running before you order, the checks worth running on installation day, and the small set of documents that make a board at 392 road kilometres from our workshop supportable without a van journey.
LED scrolling sign in Novo mesto — manufacturing, installation, quote
In a town whose largest employers, Krka above all, run validated processes and audited quality systems, the strange thing about text displays is how rarely anybody tests one. A board is ordered, hung, switched on, and declared finished. Novo mesto is exactly the place to do it the other way round, because the people buying here, from the Bršljin production halls to a trade counter in Kandija, already know what an acceptance protocol is and will happily apply one to a sign if somebody hands them the criteria.
The acceptance test nobody writes into the order
Criteria first, hardware second
Before a specification exists, write down the pass conditions: from which spot the board must be readable, at what time of day, by somebody moving at what speed, showing which real message. Four sentences are enough, and they take ten minutes. Everything downstream then has an answer. Character height stops being a matter of taste, the choice between one colour and full colour becomes an argument you can settle, and the handover has something to be measured against. A board without pass conditions can never actually fail, which is precisely why so many of them quietly do.
A paper mock-up on the pavement itself
Twenty minutes that save a wrong purchase
Print the longest genuine message at the character height you are considering, tape it up at the intended mounting position, and go and stand where your reader will be. Do it at the actual location, whether that is a shopfront under the arcades of Glavni trg or a gate on the Otoška cesta approach. What this reveals is almost never the letter size. It is the obstruction nobody had noticed: a tree in the avenue, a delivery van parked in the same spot every morning, a canopy that cuts the sightline from the crossing on the Kandija side. Move the position now, on paper, rather than after a steel bracket is on the wall.
The dusk window, where boards fail
Neither daylight nor darkness
Displays are usually judged at noon and at night, and they behave acceptably at both. The half hour when the sky is still bright and the street lighting has come on is the condition that catches them out: a board set for daylight is now painfully hard, and one set for night is already lost against the sky. That is what the ambient sensor and a staged dimming curve are for, and it is why we ask to be on site at that hour on installation day. Twenty minutes at dusk produces a setting the owner never has to think about again.
What the board shows when the source stops
The failure state is a specification item
Sooner or later the network drops, a scheduling machine is rebuilt, or the person who managed the content leaves. The question is what appears on the display in that hour. A frozen message from a fortnight ago is worse than a blank board, because it is confidently wrong and the public reads it as current. We set a defined fallback: after a stated period without a fresh update, the board drops to a permanent, always-true item, or it goes dark. Which of the two you choose is your decision, but making no decision means choosing the frozen message by default.
The settings sheet as a deliverable
One page, and it leaves with the board
At handover we write down the things that are impossible to reconstruct later: the controller's network address and how it joins the Wi-Fi, the brightness steps and the hours they apply, the scroll rate, the fallback rule, and where the reserve modules were left. That sheet is worth more than the manual. It is what lets a new facilities manager in three years' time change the message without calling anybody, and it is the first thing we ask for when a fault is reported. Two people at your end should hold a copy, not one.
What must be provable across 392 kilometres
Remote evidence against a van journey
From the workshop the board is a four hour drive away, so the useful question at design time is which faults can be demonstrated without one. A controller that is reachable over the network can be interrogated, restarted and reloaded remotely, and a phone photograph of the running board at a known time settles most disputes about what it displayed. What cannot be done remotely is a dead tile, a water ingress or a failed supply. Those are why the delivery includes reserve modules from the same batch and why we show two of your people how to change one. The warranty runs one or two years; the point of the arrangement is that most of it goes unused.
