Curious Iowa: How do electronic signs work?

If you drive north on Interstate 380 into Cedar Rapids, you’ll pass by the Nesper Sign Advertising electronic message center, which will greet you with a Laffy Taffy-esque joke.

Gazette reader Pat Badtke of Cedar Rapids wondered how these electronic message centers work and what restrictions are in place for electronic signs.

She wrote to Curious Iowa, a Gazette series that answers readers’ questions about our state, its people and culture, with these questions. We reached out to Nesper Sign Advertising in Cedar Rapids to learn more about electronic message centers — and we invited Badtke to join us.

What regulations do electronic signs follow?

Nesper President Phil Garland said the sign industry is highly regulated and signs are broken into two groups: off-site and on-site signs.

On-site signs advertise where a product is being sold. Off-site signs, like billboards, advertise something that isn’t being sold on the same property.

Electronic message boards are typically found on-site. Think of the electronic signs outside of Theatre Cedar Rapids and the Paramount in downtown Cedar Rapids. These signs are made up of LED panels.

LEDs — or light-emitting diodes — are not light bulbs per se thought they emit light. Instead, LEDs look like little chips with a small dome covering. (Watch the attached video for a closer look.)

Garland said cities have differing regulations on sign advertising, with some overlap with state and federal regulations, “but most of it is by its size and placement.”

“Obviously, no one wants one next door to their home, shining in their bedroom.” he said.

What restrictions are imposed on electronic signs?

Some cities, like Davenport, dictate how bright electronic message centers can be. Sign brightness is measured in “nits.” Davenport limits the maximum brightness of a sign to 5,000 nits during the day and 500 nits at night.

Garland said electronic signs have automated dimmers these days. They also have louvers that direct where light goes, so it shines at a roadway and not on someone’s property.

“If it’s a sunny day, they will brighten up. They dim down when it’s night so you don’t get a big glow around — that actually makes them more readable,” Garland said. “It’s kind of counterproductive to make them overly bright.”

While sign advertising is highly regulated, some city codes haven’t caught up to technology.

“I spend a lot of my time in front of city councils and variance boards and that sort of thing, try to educate the public,” Garland said. “It’s a process.”

Iowan invented first LED flat-screen TV as teenager

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Some of the technological advancements that allow us to experience electronic message centers today originated in Iowa.

In 1977, 17-year-old Jim Mitchell developed the world’s first flat LED TV screen at his home in Alburnett.

Using supplies from Radio Shack and parts advertised in the back of Popular Electronics magazine, Mitchell created a red and black LED display that synchronized with TV signals and mirrored the display on his family’s transistor TV.

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Mitchell was inspired to create the model after ordering 4-by-5 dot matrix digits from Popular Electronics. Think of the numbers on a microwave or stove. Those digits are made with line segments. The digits Mitchell ordered make numbers with individual dots as opposed to segments.

The digits he ordered could be used for something like a calculator, but Mitchell found the digits were hard-wired for letters and numbers.

“They couldn’t be put together to address a picture and so that’s why I had to develop my own screen.” Mitchell told The Gazette.

So, he laid out a custom 16-by-16 dot matrix array of LEDs, etched his own circuit board and used a new computer memory addressing chip to scan a line of LEDs. Then, with the help of his mother’s transistorized kitchen TV, he synchronized his model with the TV signal and put cartoons and KCRG newscasts on the screen.

Mitchell won the Grand Award for the physical sciences at the Cedar Rapids science fair in 1978. That year, his model was displayed at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Anaheim, Calif., and won awards from NASA, General Motors, Westinghouse.

Mitchell’s screen was a 3.5-inch square, but he predicted that in the future, LED screens would be measured in feet.

He also called for the completion of the blue LED. He knew that by combining red, green and blue LEDs, a color screen could be made.

“The whole idea of a television set using LEDs was fairly useless until the blue LED came around.” Mitchell said.

In the early 1990s, Japanese scientists Shuji Nakamura, Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano developed the blue LED for commercial use, an invention that won the Nobel Prize in 2014. After that, full color displays exploded.

At the time, Mitchell was working on radios at Rockwell Collins. He tried to buy land on the corner of Collins Road and First Avenue East to put up an electronic sign.

“I could see these displays being used in billboards and still, these displays hadn’t even really gone anywhere yet,” Mitchell said. “And so I went down to the building department, and I talked to the city engineer, and he said not only no, but, hell, no ... and so the Cedar Rapids building department was probably the first encounter of somebody wanting to put up on electronic sign. And that was me.”

Mitchell said it warms his heart to see what is now possible with sign technology, from stadiums to the Las Vegas Strip and Times Square.

Today, Mitchell, 65, is “sort of” retired but continues to innovate in the field of electronics. He splits his time between Cedar Rapids and Florida.

Are LED signs efficient?

During The Gazette’s visit to Nesper Sign Advertising, Garland showed Badtke a sign headed to Exchange State Bank in Springville, northeast of Cedar Rapids. Badtke asked him how much it cost to power an LED sign of that size compared to the incandescent bulbs that were once used.

Garland said the LED sign costs about 40 cents a day, or $30 a month. He said the Nesper sign on I-380 once cost almost $1,000 a month to operate before upgrading the bulbs.

Garland said it takes just a few days for his shop to complete an order like the bank’s new sign.

“We built the metal frame that went on it,” he said. “They’ll paint it, test it out and then we may have some other components, some poles or something, to put it on.”

Then the sign is loaded onto a truck, transported and installed.

Garland said that for small businesses, electronic message centers are efficient for marketing because the messages can be changed instantly. If it rains, advertise umbrellas. When the sun comes out, after a few taps on a computer, advertise sunglasses.

“They actually allow businesses to have a smaller sign because they can put more messages up in a smaller area, and they don’t have to have banners all over,” Garland said. “They don’t have to have multiple signs. ... The Small Business Association claims that they’re the most efficient type of marketing that a business can use.”

How are the signs programmed?

Updating what’s displayed on an electronic message center only takes a few minutes.

The signs are programmed through a proprietary software program that has stock fonts and graphics. The messages can be scheduled ahead of time, and most signs these days use Wi-Fi. The only real limitation is message length.

“You have to realize that you have about six to seven seconds ... for somebody to see that, so they have to be pretty short,” Donna Garland, vice president of Nesper, said.

On its own sign, Nesper typically displays “kid jokes,” she said, adding anyone can send in a PG joke for consideration.

“We have had people who would write to us and tell us that they are from out of town, and when they saw the Nesper sign, that they knew they were home because they would see the messages,” she said. “And so it was a really warm welcome, warm feeling for people traveling from out of town.”

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Comments: bailey.cichon@thegazette.com