A running-text board is the least glamorous product we make and often the most used. It shows a line of text, it is legible from across the road, it draws very little power, and it is changed by whoever is on the counter rather than by a designer. This page explains what these boards can and cannot do, how to size one for the reading distance you actually have in Petrinja, and how they are updated and serviced from 362 kilometres away.
LED scrolling sign in Petrinja — manufacturing, installation, quote
The information that matters most in Petrinja changes weekly rather than yearly. Which pharmacy is on duty this weekend, when the Čazmatrans service to Sisak leaves after the timetable change, which street is closed while a crane works on a restored building, what the newly reopened library on Ivana Gundulića is doing on Saturday. That is the kind of message a running-text board handles better than anything else, because it can be rewritten in a minute from a phone and it costs almost nothing to run. A town of just under twenty thousand people with a great deal of ongoing construction generates a lot of short-lived notices.
What a text board does well, and what it cannot do
One line, read in passing, changed in a minute
A ticker is a reading device, not a picture. It carries a duty rota, an opening time, a price, a queue number or a short warning, and it does that job at a fraction of the cost of a video surface. What it will not do is show your logo in colour, play a clip or carry a photograph. Businesses that buy a text board expecting a small television are disappointed within a month; businesses that buy one to stop answering the same telephone question forty times a day are usually pleased with it for years.
Single colour, two colour or full colour
Three price levels for what looks like the same board
A single-colour board in amber or red is the cheapest, the brightest for the money and entirely sufficient for text. A two-colour board lets you mark one line as urgent, which is genuinely useful for a duty rota or a closure notice. A full-colour board is a small LED display with a text layout on it, and it costs several times the single-colour version; it earns that only if you will also show graphics. We quote all three when a client is unsure, because the difference in price is large and the difference in the photographs is not.
Character height against the reading distance
Measure the distance first, then choose the board
Legibility is a function of character height. A ten centimetre character stays comfortable to something like thirty or forty metres in ordinary conditions, and less into low sun. So the sequence is: pace out the distance from where the reader will be standing or driving, choose the character height that carries it, and only then decide how many characters must fit on a line. Doing it the other way round produces a board that fits the budget and cannot be read from the far pavement of Trg dr. Franje Tuđmana, which is the most common mistake in this product category.
Inside the glass or out on the wall
Two mounting situations with very different costs
A board hung behind shop glass needs no weather sealing, no external cable route and no facade fixing, and on a restored building that is a considerable advantage. The penalty is reflection: it wants to sit back from the pane and away from direct sun, or the reader sees the street instead of the text. A board mounted outside on the elevation is sealed, brighter and visible at wider angles, but it is a facade fixing with everything that implies here, including the repair drawings and the question of who signs off the anchors.
Updating the text without a cable to the board
Wi-Fi from the counter, or a scheduled list that runs itself
The controller joins the premises network over Wi-Fi, so once power reaches the board no data cable has to be pulled to it. Staff type the new line on a phone or a computer and it appears. Recurring content is better handled as a schedule: the duty rota for a whole month, seasonal opening times, or a set of messages that rotate by hour and day, all loaded once. Where there is no network at all, the list can be carried to the board on a memory stick, which some clients still prefer for a board they touch twice a year.
Service across 362 kilometres, and what stays on site
Spares in the drawer beat a van on the motorway
Text boards fail rarely, and when they do it is usually a power supply or a single module rather than the whole unit. Because Petrinja is 362 kilometres from the workshop and a callout here is not a same-afternoon proposition, we supply the spare module and the spare supply with the board and show your own maintenance person how to change them. Most faults are then cleared the same day by someone already on the premises. Anything beyond that is handled on a scheduled visit combined with other work in the county, and the warranty runs one or two years according to the build.
