A programmable text display is a strip of LED tiles with a controller that stores a list of messages and, more usefully, a list of times. This page is organised around that second list. It covers what time-driven content is worth, how the schedule is built, whether such a small device survives a position facing the sea, how much text fits before it stops being read, whether to run two languages, and what maintaining one on the coast actually involves.
LED scrolling sign in Zadar — manufacturing, installation, quote
Most businesses think of a text sign as something they update weekly. Zadar suggests a different habit, because so much of what matters here is governed by the hour rather than by the week. Sunset has a published time and the crowd on the waterfront assembles against it. Sailings from the ferry port run to a timetable. Excursion boats leave and return at fixed hours, the Roman Forum empties as the restaurants around it fill, and a shop on Kalelarga has a completely different customer at eleven in the morning than at nine at night. A programmable strip that changes its own message four times a day, without anybody touching it, is doing something no printed card and no static sign can do at all.
Why does the clock matter more here than the calendar?
Four messages a day beat one message a month
A board that shows the same sentence for a fortnight becomes invisible to everybody who walks past it twice. A board whose content changes with the hour is read repeatedly, because the reader learns that it is telling them something current. In a coastal city where the day has genuine phases, that difference is unusually easy to exploit: a morning message about coffee and opening, a midday message about the lunch menu or a departure, an afternoon message aimed at people coming back from the water, and an evening message for the crowd that appears after sunset. None of this requires anybody to be present. The controller holds each item with a validity window, so the morning line stops at eleven and the evening line begins at seven whether or not the owner is in the shop. The effort is entirely at the start, in writing four short sentences and deciding when each one runs.
How is a schedule of that kind actually built?
Items, windows, order and repetition
Each entry in the message list carries the text itself, a display duration, an optional start and end time and, if wanted, a date range. The controller plays whatever is valid at that moment, in the order given, and loops. A seasonal item can be given a date range so that it appears in June and disappears in September without anybody remembering to remove it, which is exactly the kind of task people do forget. The list reaches the controller in one of three ways. A USB stick is the simplest and needs no network at all. A wired connection suits a unit inside a building with existing cabling. Wi-Fi is what most owners end up using, because no data cable has to be pulled from the office to the sign and the content can be changed from a telephone, or from another country. Only the power supply has to physically reach the board.
Will a small strip survive a position facing the sea?
Sealing, fixings and the cleaning interval
An outdoor text board is sealed to IP65 and that handles rain and windblown spray, but a marine position asks two further questions. The first is what the brackets and screws are made of, because stainless fixings are the difference between a sign that comes down in eight years and one that starts staining a limestone wall in three. The second is the cable entry, which should be a downward-facing gland rather than a hole with sealant in it. The practical maintenance is cleaning. A salt film on the face costs measurable brightness and holds moisture against every joint, and wiping it down two or three times a year does more for the sign's life than any specification decision. A board mounted inside the window, on the dry side of the glass, avoids all of this and is the right answer whenever the shopfront allows it.
How much text fits before the message stops working?
Letter height, strip length and the walking reader
Character height follows the reading distance, at roughly a centimetre of letter for every four metres. Because the tiles are 32 centimetres wide and 16 high, the strip's length grows in 32 centimetre steps and its height in 16, so the practical decision is how many tiles long the board is and whether the text runs on one line or two. The harder limit is time rather than space. Somebody walking along Kalelarga is in front of a shop for perhaps four seconds, and any message that takes longer than that to pass will be read in fragments by everyone and completely by nobody. Six to eight words is the working maximum for a moving line. Where a message genuinely fits within the strip, it is better to hold it still for three seconds than to scroll it, because static text is read faster than moving text by a wide margin.
Should the board run in more than one language?
Alternating items, and the cost of doing it badly
In a city with this much international footfall the question comes up immediately, and the answer is usually yes for two languages and no for four. The controller handles it by alternating items, so the Croatian line plays, then the English line, then the next pair. The full character set is supported, including č, ć, š, ž and đ, so nothing is lost in the local text. What goes wrong is cycle length. Two languages doubles the time it takes for the whole rotation to complete, and a reader standing for a few seconds may see only the half they cannot read. The fix is to shorten the list rather than to speed up the scroll: two messages in two languages is a better board than five messages in two languages, and considerably better than five messages in four.
What does keeping one going on the coast involve?
Spares, warranty and a 574 kilometre journey
Text boards are supplied with one or two years of warranty according to configuration, and with spare tiles from the same production batch. On the coast we push harder than usual for those spares to stay on the premises, because Zadar is 574 road kilometres from our workshop and a service journey is a two-day trip. A local electrician or maintenance contractor can exchange a tile in a quarter of an hour once shown how, and we demonstrate the procedure at handover. Running costs are small. A single-line strip draws tens of watts, and with an evening dimming schedule and an overnight off period the annual electricity is negligible against the shop's other loads. Where a board is fixed to a facade facing a public street it counts as an illuminated device under the local signage rules, exactly as a larger sign does; we provide the technical annexes for the submission and the competent authority makes the decision. Travel and subsistence for any visit of ours appear as separate lines in the offer.
