A programmable text display is a strip of LED tiles and a controller holding a list of messages. This page is arranged as a series of decisions, taken in the order that keeps them from contradicting one another, and it puts unusual weight on the settings that most suppliers leave at the factory default: how fast the text moves, how long each item is held, and how often the cycle repeats. Get those right and a cheap board outperforms an expensive one.
LED scrolling sign in Slavonski Brod — manufacturing, installation, quote
Croatia · 422 km from our plant in Győr
A moving line of text has one variable that no other display shares, and it is not size or colour but speed. Slavonski Brod happens to contain two audiences travelling at completely different rates within a couple of kilometres of each other. On the Korzo people walk, stop, look in windows and stand talking, and a reader there has as long as they want. On the roads leading down to the Sava bridge and the crossing to Bosanski Brod the same message passes a windscreen at speed, and on a bad day a queue for the crossing turns those drivers into a stationary audience for twenty minutes. At the gates of the industrial sites, Đuro Đaković among them, a shift notice is read by people arriving on foot and by lorries arriving at walking pace. Every one of those situations needs a different scroll setting from the same hardware.
Establish first whether your reader is walking or driving
The answer changes every other decision
Write down the honest answer before anything else, because a board for pedestrians and a board for traffic are not the same product with a different price. A pedestrian on the Korzo is in front of a shopfront for several seconds and can be given a sentence. A driver has perhaps a second and a half of usable attention and can be given a number, a word, or nothing at all. The third case, a queue of stationary vehicles, is really a pedestrian audience sitting down and can take a longer message. This also determines where the board goes and how big the characters are. Reckon on roughly one centimetre of character height for every four metres of reading distance: two and a half centimetres for somebody ten metres away on the pavement, four times that for a driver reading across a junction. A board sized for walking readers and then mounted facing a road is the single most common mistake in this product category.
Count the characters your longest real message needs
Tiles come in fixed steps of 32 and 16 centimetres
Take the longest sentence you genuinely intend to display, not a hypothetical one, and count its characters. That number, together with the character height you settled in the previous step, gives the strip length required to show it without scrolling, and from there the tile count follows: modules are 32 centimetres wide and 16 high, so the board grows in those increments and in no others. Most buyers find at this point that they must choose between a longer board and a shorter message. The shorter message is almost always the better purchase. A second line is the other option, which doubles the height of the strip and lets a fixed heading sit above changing text, and it suits a pharmacy or a service counter far better than a single very long line does.
Set the scroll speed against the speed of the reader
Slower than feels right, in nearly every case
The default scroll rate on almost every controller is faster than a person can comfortably read, because a brisk crawl looks lively in a showroom. In use it is the reason people say a board is hard to read. For pedestrian positions, slow the text until a walker can follow it without effort; for a road position, do not scroll at all if it can be avoided, and instead hold each short item static for two or three seconds. The other timing figure that matters is the cycle length. If four messages each hold for five seconds, a passer-by has to stand for twenty seconds to see them all, and almost nobody does. Two or three items in rotation is a board that gets read; six is a board that gets ignored. These settings are adjusted from the office in a minute, so they can be tuned after installation by simply standing across the street and watching.
Choose the colour depth on evidence rather than preference
Single colour, or full colour with a reason
A single-colour board in red or amber is the most legible way to present words and numbers, is more visible in poor visibility than a full-colour panel of the same size, and costs substantially less. For duty hours, prices, exchange information, shift notices and queue numbers it is not a compromise but the correct choice. Full colour earns its price when the board must also carry a logo in specific brand colours, simple graphics or a coloured warning state. It is worth asking what the board will show in its third year rather than in its first week, because the answer is usually more text and fewer pictures than anyone expects at the time of ordering. Where the budget is tight, spending it on a longer single-colour strip beats spending it on a shorter full-colour one.
Load the schedule and decide who holds the access
USB, network or Wi-Fi, and two people rather than one
Content reaches the controller by one of three routes. A USB stick works where there is no network at all and requires somebody to be present. A wired connection suits premises with existing cabling. Wi-Fi is what most buyers choose, because it removes any need to run a data cable to the sign and lets the text be changed from a telephone anywhere; only the electricity supply has to physically reach the board. The decision that costs nothing and matters most is who holds the credentials. Give them to two people. A board that can only be updated by one employee will, at some point, display the wrong opening hours for a fortnight while that person is on leave. A company with several premises can push one list to all of them and still leave a local line for each, which is how a group keeps a common notice while every site shows its own telephone number.
Agree the warranty terms and what happens on the day it fails
Spares in a drawer, and a 379 kilometre journey avoided
Text boards carry one or two years of warranty depending on configuration, and are delivered with spare tiles from the same production batch. The reason those spares matter is arithmetic: Slavonski Brod is 379 road kilometres from our workshop, so even though a service visit is a single day out and back, exchanging a tile locally takes fifteen minutes and costs nothing. We show a local electrician or your own maintenance staff how it is done at handover. The faults that do need us are almost always in the controller or the power supply rather than the display surface, and many of them can be diagnosed remotely if the board is on a network. Where a visit is required, travel and subsistence appear as separate lines in the offer rather than inside the price of the sign. If the board is mounted on a facade facing a public street it falls under the local rules for illuminated devices; we prepare the technical annexes for the submission and the competent authority takes the decision.
