A programmable text board is the least expensive product we make and the easiest to waste money on. This page is deliberately weighted towards the decisions that determine whether it works at all: what belongs on it, who writes it, where it fails, and the uses that have nothing to do with advertising. The technical specification is covered too, but it is the short part.
LED scrolling sign in Sesvete — manufacturing, installation, quote
There is a stretch of the day, twice over, when Sesvete moves as one: shortly after six in the morning and again between four and six in the afternoon, when the platform at Sesvete station empties, the buses turn on Trg Dragutina Domjanića and the queue builds at the lights. A scrolling text board only works if it lives inside one of those windows. Outside them the same board is talking to an empty pavement. This is the first thing we ask a customer here, before pitch, before colour, before size: at what hour is the person you want to reach standing in front of this wall, and for how many seconds. Almost every disappointing text board we have been called out to failed that question rather than a technical one.
The sentence comes first
If you cannot write it, do not order the board
Before any quotation, write down the exact line you would put on the display next Tuesday, and the different line for the Tuesday after. If both sentences arrive easily, the board will earn its keep. If the second one is hard to produce, you are describing a fixed message, and a fixed message belongs on a printed or illuminated sign that costs less and looks better. The businesses that succeed with these boards are the ones with information that genuinely expires: a duty rota, a rate, a delivery day, a queue position, a capacity figure, a temperature.
Three ways a text board dies
Neglect, verbosity and bad position
The first death is silence: the last message dates from the opening week and everyone stopped seeing it by March. The second is the wall of text, where four lines scroll past and a passer-by, who has perhaps three seconds, reads none of them. The third is position, typically a board mounted a metre too high or angled at a pavement nobody walks along. All three are cheap to avoid at the planning stage and impossible to fix afterwards without moving hardware. We would rather lose the order than install a board we expect to see dark within a year.
Boards that never face the street
Gatehouses, counters and shift information
In the warehouse and workshop units around Sesvetski Kraljevec the most useful text displays we have supplied are internal ones. A board at a gatehouse showing which bay a lorry should take, a counter display calling the next number, a unit above a workshop door carrying the day's production figure or the number of days since the last incident. These have a defined audience who look at them daily, which is why they stay in use for years. They also demand nothing decorative: single colour, plain characters, an unglamorous enclosure, and a data feed from a system somebody already maintains.
Character height, in one paragraph
The only arithmetic you need
One centimetre of capital height carries a word roughly three or four metres, and that ratio settles the whole specification. Across a shop counter, characters of four to six centimetres do the work; to be caught from the far kerb of Zagrebačka cesta they must reach fifteen or twenty. Board dimensions then follow the 16 and 32 centimetre module steps, and the real decision is one tall line against two short ones. Two lines look generous on a drawing and read poorly in traffic; a single line of large characters wins nearly every time.
Two people with the password
Ownership, not cabling, is the failure point
Publishing is the easy half: a handset or a notebook sends the text wirelessly, the wired network serves larger sites, and where there is no coverage at all the controller reads a prepared file from a memory stick. The difficulty is that one person knows how, and that person goes on holiday. Name two people at handover, have both of them publish a message while we are still on site, and store the credentials somewhere other than in one head. Messages can be queued with validity dates, so a fortnight of changing lines can be loaded in one sitting by whoever is available.
What the money buys, and what it does not
Honest limits at 300 kilometres
A text board is inexpensive to buy and cheap to run, drawing far less power than a video wall of the same face area. An outdoor housing carries an IP65 seal and enough output to hold up against sunlight; a unit behind shop glazing works at a small fraction of that level. It cannot display photographs usefully, it will not rescue a business that nobody walks past, and it is not a substitute for a proper sign carrying your name. What it does, better than anything else at the price, is tell people something today that was not true yesterday. Cover lasts a year or two by specification, replacement tiles arrive in the same crate, and at 300 kilometres we can put hands on the device and be home the same night.
