LED Ticker Technology Tip: Controlling A Large Network
Posted on Thu, December 31, 2009
How easy is it to control a large network of tickers?
Historically the tickers were dumb devices, each unit had a controller that simply received a stream of data and the software that sat central to a network holding a unique conversation with each ticker to ensure each ticker had enough data in its buffer to keep running smoothly. Once a network reached 50 or so tickers it became challenging for the PC and the software to keep everything in sync.
But all of that has changed. Over the last 2 years we have perfected a smart controller for each of the tickers. This now means the smarts reside at each ticker giving the user more control and ensuring that each ticker runs smoothly allowing you to add hundreds if not thousands of tickers to the system with no impact on performance. The other key advantage to this method is you no longer have a single point of failure. Each ticker is self contained and a controller failure only impacts that location - not the whole network.
If you haven’t looked at tickers in a few years I would encourage you to revisit them. They now have full color capability, more data feed options, and by eliminating the computers at each site and allowing for simple web-based control it makes them ideal to put into any location with little to no IT support.
