Those letters that clatter over on a departure board. Now a menu, a countdown, the weather, or a message your room sends from their phones, in most languages. The real ones cost thousands and hang in one place. This is $49 and runs on any screen you like.
I love travelling, and the best thing in any terminal was never the lounge. It was the board. That sound when a whole wall of letters turns over at once, and everyone looks up.
So I set out to find how they work, and got completely obsessed. I pulled apart footage of real Solari boards frame by frame: how long a flap takes to fall, where it slows, how a letter settles, why a row ripples instead of turning all at once. Get any of that wrong and the eye knows straight away.
SplitMotion™ is what came out of that. Every flap, timed against the real thing. Then all the parts a mechanical board cannot do: every language, every symbol, every emoji, any size, on a screen you already own.
The physical boards cost thousands, ship in months, and hang in one place. This is the same beautiful thing, on the television behind you.
Donny Sin / Reverse engineered
Give each TV a name and it shows its own board. The menu in the kitchen, the welcome at the door, the countdown behind the bar, all from one Mac and one licence.
The menu, changed from your phone while the queue is still at the door. Happy hour turns itself on at five.
A guest welcomed by name, the hours, what is next in the calendar, and an alert that takes every screen at once.
The room writes to the board from their own phones, and nothing appears until you allow it.
A transparent overlay straight into OBS. Follower goals, now playing, countdown to going live.
Prices, offers, opening hours, and the weather that is about to walk through the door.
The school run, whose turn it is, and a message waiting on the kitchen TV for whoever gets home first.
A mechanical board is a beautiful object. It is also a machine with hundreds of moving parts, hanging in exactly one place.
Flaps, motors and bearings wear out. Repairs mean parts, a service call, or shipping the thing back.
The noise is the mechanism. Reviewers stop talking while it turns over. Ours has a volume, and an off switch.
Fixed size, fixed place, fixed number of characters, decided the day it was built. Want a second room? Buy a second board.
$119 a year for the content feeds on top of $3,499 for the board.
The software rivals start at nothing and then charge every month, for every screen. Ten TVs is about €200 a month, forever.
$49 once. Every screen you own. Nothing to break, nothing to service, and you can silence it.
All of it works today. The three marked MAC read something living on your own computer, so those need the app.
| Menus | Sections, several price columns, dotted leaders, automatic paging, and a happy hour that turns itself on and off. |
| Countdowns | To a date, or to a time that comes round again, rolling on to tomorrow by itself. |
| Clocks | 12 or 24 hour, seconds, any date format. |
| World clocks | Several cities at once, for anyone whose work is somewhere else. |
| Weather | Feels like, today's high and low, rain chance, humidity, UV, wind. |
| Prices | Crypto and stocks with the move in green or red, and your own holdings. |
| News and feeds | Headlines on any subject, or any RSS feed you already read. |
| Messages | Anything you want said. Any language, emoji and special symbols included. |
| Alerts | Takes over every screen the moment you press it, then hands the rotation back on its own. |
| Calendar MAC | Counts down to your next real event. |
| Now playing MAC | Whatever Music or Spotify is playing. |
| Mail and messages MAC | The newest one, shown with a name rather than a number. |
| Social counters | Follower and subscriber counts on the wall. |
| Mac battery | For a machine driving a screen somewhere awkward. |
| Webhooks | Anything else you can send from another system lands on the board. |
| Audience screens | Polls, trivia, Q&A, guest book, confessions, anonymous messages and dare requests. A QR code appears on the board. A guest points their phone camera at it, taps once, and is typing. Their message, vote, question or dare arrives for you to approve. No app to download, no account, nothing to install. |
| Moderation | Nothing reaches the wall until you allow it. A rude-word filter across about twenty languages catches the obvious and the disguised, with an optional second opinion from Google. |
| Languages | Most of them. Arabic and Hebrew run right to left properly. Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Cyrillic. Emoji on the flaps. |
| Sound | The real clack of the flaps, with a volume control, or silent. |
| Grid | From 10 to 48 columns and 3 to 24 rows, up to 1,152 flaps. Or switch on fill and the board stretches to the exact shape of the screen, portrait or landscape. |
| Colour | Background, letters and accent, for the whole board or one screen at a time. |
| Display modes | Fullscreen, screensaver, wallpaper, or a transparent overlay for streaming into OBS. |
| Screens per licence | Unlimited. Name a TV and it shows its own board. |
| Runs on | macOS 14+, iPad, or any browser. Send it to a TV or monitor over wifi or a cable. |
| Phone control | Scan, approve the device on the Mac, and it is the same editor in your hand. Save it to the home screen and it opens like an app. |
| Boards | Several open at once as tabs, saving as you type. Close one and it waits in saved boards; delete it and the bin holds it thirty days. |
| Undo | Forty steps, and every version of the board kept on the Mac. |
| Scheduling | Any screen can run only on chosen days, between chosen hours, or take the whole board while it does. |
| Network | Everything local stays on your own wifi. No account needed to run a menu, and no internet needed either. |
| Updates | Free, forever, signed so nothing else can pretend to be one. |
That is the whole idea.
Mac app and the browser version. $99 after the first hundred.
Same download. The key decides which one you are.