This page treats the programmable LED text board as an orientation device rather than an advertising one: how to write the small number of sentences a lost visitor actually needs, where to mount a board so that it appears at the point a decision is taken, why distances and directions beat descriptive language, how to keep the cycle short enough to be read on foot, what a salt-air position demands of the enclosure, and how to keep one running 717 kilometres from the works in Győr.
LED scrolling sign in Solin — manufacturing, installation, quote
Croatia · 717 km from our plant in Győr
Most scrolling boards are sold to advertise something. In Solin a surprising number should be doing a different job entirely, which is telling people where they are and where to go next. The archaeological park at Salona has more than one way in, the path to Gospin otok is not obvious from the main road, Gašpina mlinica sits on the Jadro away from the through-route, and the boundary between Solin and Split is invisible to anyone who has not lived here. A large share of the people walking past a business here are not deciding what to buy; they are working out whether they have arrived. A board that answers that question earns its place in a way that a discount message never will, and it does so for residents too, because the people who ask a shopkeeper for directions are asking twenty times a day.
Write the three sentences a lost visitor needs
Where you are, where the thing is, how far
Sit down and write them out before looking at any hardware. In nearly every case they reduce to three: the name of the place the reader is standing in, the direction and distance to whatever they are looking for, and one piece of information with a consequence, such as opening hours or where the entrance is. Anything beyond those three is competing with them. The test for each sentence is whether a stranger who reads only that sentence is better off. Most draft content fails it. A slogan does not help somebody find the amphitheatre entrance; an arrow, a name and a figure in metres do. Businesses that adopt this approach usually find their board becomes more useful to their own customers as well, because the questions residents ask at the counter turn out to be the same questions.
Mount the board where the decision is made
The junction, not the doorway
The instinct is to put the board on the shop front. For orientation content that is often the wrong place, because by the time somebody is at your door they have already made the choice the board was meant to inform. The useful position is where the reader hesitates: at a junction, at the point where a footpath leaves the road, at the end of a car park, wherever people slow down and look around. That frequently means a bracket on a side elevation rather than the main facade, angled towards the approach. It also means considering what else occupies the sightline at that height, since a mature tree in leaf removes a board for six months of the year. We photograph the position from the reader's eye level during the survey, which settles the argument faster than a description does.
Give distances and directions rather than adjectives
Numbers survive translation and hurry
A visitor scanning a moving line of text at walking pace absorbs concrete items and skips everything else. Metres, arrows, times and names get through; descriptive language does not. This has a useful side effect in a place that receives visitors from many countries, because numerals and directional arrows require no translation and cost nothing in cycle time. Be accurate with them. A board that says two hundred metres when the walk is six hundred is worse than a board that says nothing, because the reader stops trusting it and so does everyone they tell. Walk the route once and measure it. This is a fifteen-minute job that determines whether the display is believed for the next ten years.
Keep the cycle short enough to be read while walking past
Character height, message count and eight seconds of attention
Someone on foot has roughly eight seconds in front of your board. A cycle of three messages at five seconds each fits into two passes; a cycle of eight messages does not fit at all, and the reader receives a fragment of something irrelevant and moves on. Character height is the other half of it. Allow about one centimetre for every four metres of reading distance, with a margin because the reader is moving. From eight metres across a pavement that is around two and a half centimetres, and the length of the board then follows from the longest sentence you actually need at that height. Because the strip is assembled from the same 32 by 16 centimetre panels as our other products, that length arrives in fixed steps, so it is worth doing the calculation before choosing a unit rather than afterwards.
Seal the unit for salt and plan the rinse
Glands, drainage and a bracket that is not the weak point
A text board mounted outdoors in this area needs the same treatment as any other coastal installation, and the enclosure is the easy part. Cable glands rather than improvised entries, penetrations drilled to fall outwards, drainage so condensate leaves the case, stainless fixings and an isolating layer where the bracket meets a dissimilar metal. Then build the rinse into somebody's routine: fresh water over the face and the mountings two or three times a year. Salt deposits that are washed off do nothing; salt deposits left to set draw moisture and start the corrosion that eventually takes a bracket. This is the cheapest maintenance in the whole product range and the one most often forgotten in the second year.
Hand over two logins and keep spares on the shelf
Why 717 kilometres should almost never matter
Text reaches the controller over Wi-Fi, over a network cable or from a USB stick, and messages can be scheduled with time windows so that a summer set of items and a winter set switch by date without anybody touching the board. Two people on your side should hold the access from the day of handover, because an orientation board carrying last season's information is worse than no board at all. Spare modules travel with the original delivery and a module change is demonstrated at handover, so that a local electrician can restore the display within hours. That is deliberate at this distance: Solin is 717 kilometres from the works, which means a two-day journey with an overnight stay, itemised on any chargeable visit. Warranty runs one or two years by build, and the aim of the spares is that you almost never have to use it.
