Planning an installation
This page covers the decisions you make before anything gets built: how the display sits in the room, how you reach a module that stops working, what it weighs, and what happens when something fails. It's written for permanent installations in galleries, offices, lobbies and exhibitions, and for the architects, carpenters and engineers who have to sign them off.
For how the boards and modules connect, see Wiring & Power. The raw numbers are on Specifications.
Enclosure: cabinet or recess
Two approaches keep coming up, and both work.
A cabinet, meaning a wooden or metal box hung on the wall, is the straightforward option. It's self-contained, it can be built off-site, and it can be taken down and moved. The catch is weight. At roughly 400 g per module, a 26-module display is around 10 kg of modules before the case, and a cabinet solid enough to carry that on a wall is carpentry work rather than a weekend job.
A recess in the wall, a shallow niche the display nests into, is the quieter result and mechanically the easier one. The wall carries the load instead of a hanging box, cable runs and the power supply disappear behind it, and there's nothing to swing when the flaps move. A display of moving flaps has real mechanical momentum, and a rigid mounting surface handles that better than a suspended cabinet.
Whichever you choose, plan around three things: the clearance above the modules, where the power supply lives, and how you reach a module later.
Service access
Assume that at some point one module has to come out. There are two ways to build for that.
Rear access is how it works today. Modules are screwed to a backboard through the three holes in the back case, and the backboard has to be reachable from behind to take a module out. That's fine for a cabinet and fine for a wall you can get behind. It's a problem for a sealed recess.
Front extraction, pulling a module out through the face of the display without touching the back, is in development. The connector boards between modules double as part of the retention mechanism, so a module can be released and lifted out from the front. If you're planning a recessed installation where the back will be permanently closed up, get in touch before you build. That's the case it's being designed for.
Order one or two modules more than your display needs. A spare that can be swapped in during an exhibition is worth far more than the module costs, and it's the reason to keep one alphabet across all modules.
Weight and load
Roughly 400 g per module, plus the backboard, case and power supply.
| Display | Modules | Module weight |
|---|---|---|
| 12 characters | 12 | ~4.8 kg |
| 26 characters | 26 | ~10.4 kg |
| 4 rows of 20 | 80 | ~32 kg |
Beyond a handful of modules, it's the mounting surface rather than the modules that needs engineering.
Clearance and heat
Modules need no ventilation slots and no active cooling. Under continuous heavy use they stay below 38 °C.
What they do need is somewhere for warm air to go. Leave 3 to 5 mm above the modules, and avoid a fully sealed cavity behind the display where heat accumulates with no path out. A recess open at the top, or a cabinet with a gap along its upper edge, is enough.
What happens when a module fails
Every serious installation asks this first, so here it is plainly.
Power is contained. Injector boards cut the 12 V rail into isolated groups of at most five modules, each with its own eFuse. A short, an overcurrent or an overvoltage event shuts down that group and nothing else, so a fault can't cascade across the display.
Signal is a chain. Commands travel from the WiFi entry module down the row, module to module. A module whose controller has failed outright stops passing commands downstream, so everything after it in that chain goes quiet. Everything before it, and every other chain, keeps running.
That trade-off is adjustable, and for a large or hard-to-reach installation you should adjust it. Every module can connect to WiFi independently, so a long row can be split into several shorter chains, each with its own entry point. Ten chains of ten modules mean a single failure takes out at most ten modules instead of a hundred. It costs nothing but WiFi clients and a little setup.
Mechanical failures stay local. A jammed drum or a bad flap set affects only that module, which keeps passing signal and power through as normal.
Running unattended
A display in a public space shouldn't need a laptop babysitting it.
A module keeps its configuration and its content, so after a power cut the display comes back up on its own with nobody opening a browser. For content that changes, push updates to the webhook endpoint on play.flipforward.de from whatever system holds the data, or drive the display from the local-control desktop app if the installation has to stay off the internet entirely.
One thing to plan around honestly: local-control can rotate several messages on a repeat interval, but saved playlists don't exist yet. A named sequence you can store, reload and hand over is the next feature on the list, not a shipped one. If your installation depends on rotating content, tell me early.
Getting help with a specific space
If you're planning an installation and want a second pair of eyes on the mounting, the segmentation or the schedule, or you need someone to talk your gallery's engineer through the numbers on this page, write to hello@flipforward.de. Sample modules can be sent out so a mounting mock-up can be tested before the real order goes in.