A programmable text board is a single-colour or full-colour matrix that displays characters, simple graphics and a scheduled sequence of messages. It is small, it draws very little power, and it is the one product in our range that a customer 432 kilometres away can usually install without us. This page covers what these boards are good at, how big the characters have to be, who ends up typing the messages, and what the running cost really is.
LED scrolling sign in Radovljica — manufacturing, installation, quote
Slovenia · 432 km from our plant in Győr
Running-text boards are the cheapest thing we make, and Radovljica is full of the situations they were invented for. A school on Kranjska cesta needs to tell parents that Thursday's pick-up has moved; the secondary school on Gorenjska cesta posts an exam timetable; a pharmacy needs to show tonight's duty rota; the Lesce-Bled station forecourt needs a bus connection notice; a campsite reception needs opening hours in three languages. None of those is a video wall problem. All of them are a line of text that has to change without anyone printing anything.
What is a running-text board genuinely good at?
Information that changes faster than a printer can keep up
The test is simple: if the message changes more often than once a month, a board pays for itself against printing and the labour of putting the print up. Duty rotas, opening hours over a holiday period, a delayed session, a temporary closure, a price that moves weekly - all of these are cheaper on a board than on paper, and they are more likely to be correct, because nobody has to walk out with a sheet and a roll of tape. What it is not good at is persuasion. A scrolling line does not build a brand and does not replace a lit fascia sign. Businesses that buy one hoping for a display and end up with a text crawl are usually disappointed; businesses that buy one to stop printing notices almost never are.
How many characters fit, and how far away can they be read?
Character height decides the reading distance
The working rule is that a character can be read comfortably at roughly 250 times its height, so a 10 centimetre character is legible at about 25 metres and a 5 centimetre one at about 12. That figure sets the physical size of the board before anything else. A notice board beside a school door on Kranjska cesta, read by a parent standing two metres away, needs very little; a board meant to be read from a moving vehicle on Gorenjska cesta needs characters large enough that the whole unit becomes a serious object. From the height and the intended message length you get the board: a single line of twelve characters is a different product from a three-line matrix that can hold a paragraph. We ask for the longest message you realistically expect, not the shortest, because a board that has to abbreviate everything is a board that gets ignored.
Who types the message, and from where?
One responsible person, one password, one habit
Content reaches the board over the local network, from a USB stick, or from a scheduling application on a computer in the office. Technically this is easy. Organisationally it is where these installations succeed or fail, because a board with three people able to edit it and nobody responsible for it goes stale within a term and then quietly stops being read. We therefore ask, before delivery, who owns it. One named person, one deputy, a password that does not live on a sticky note, and a standing time each week when the content is reviewed. A board updated every Monday morning is worth more than a larger board updated whenever somebody remembers.
Indoor or outdoor board - what actually changes?
Sealing, brightness and the mounting height
An outdoor board is a different construction, not the same board in a case. It is sealed against driven rain, it runs far brighter so that it stays readable in direct sun, and it needs an automatic brightness sensor so that it does not blind the street at two in the morning. It is also heavier, which changes the bracket. An indoor board can be much simpler and much cheaper, and in a foyer that is the right answer. The mistake worth avoiding is the semi-outdoor position - under a canopy, behind a glazed porch, in an unheated entrance - where condensation does the damage that rain would have been blamed for. Tell us if the position is one of those and we will specify it as an outdoor unit.
Where do these boards earn their keep around Radovljica?
Schools, sports halls, forecourts and factory gates
The reliable customers are institutions with a shifting timetable and a captive audience. School entrances, where the audience is the same two hundred parents every day. Sports halls, where the board carries training times and cancellations. The forecourt of a business with visiting delivery drivers - the Elan works at Begunje na Gorenjskem and the Gorenjka chocolate factory in Lesce are exactly the type of site where a gate board saves a security officer from repeating the same directions forty times a day. The pattern in every case is a small audience that returns often. That is the opposite of the advertising logic behind a large wall, and it is why these two products almost never compete with one another for the same budget.
What does one cost to keep running?
Power, cover period and the spare you were given
The power draw of a text board is trivial next to a video surface - it is a strip of diodes lit for part of the day, not a full-colour picture. Over a year the electricity is a rounding error against the print and labour it displaces, and we put the connected load on the quotation so that you can do that sum yourself rather than take our word for it. The guarantee is set at either twelve or twenty-four months when the order is confirmed, and spare parts go out in the same package as the board so that a fault is a swap rather than a wait. Because these units are light and standard, the usual repair path at this distance is that we send a part rather than a person, which is the only sensible arrangement across 432 kilometres.
