Large Clock and Message Display.
This display is mounted high on a silo tower of a bakery. It consists of many
segments, each containing 16 yellow/black flip-over discs; a total 1376 discs.
The customer wished to display his name, the time, and the temperature, in
sequence.
Although notionally sealed and air purged, the large size of the display and its
location adjacent to flour silos, inevitably resulted in problems with individual discs
not always flipping, due to small amounts of dust on their pivots.
The system also required a PC to be permanently connected.
Quercus was asked to look at the original control system. After carrying out
experiments it was shown that reliable operation could be achieved using a
sequence of pulses to flip the disc, rather than the original simple pulses.
A replacement display control system was designed and installed using a small
dedicated control computer which automatically adjusts the time between summer
and winter time. This was installed in 2001 and was in use until the bakery was
badly damaged in a fire five years later.
