3 Ways To Stop Poor Air Quality From Ruining Digital Signage In A Manufacturing Environment
In manufacturing environments, air quality is not always cool and clean. When installing digital signage on the manufacturing floor, you must consider the air quality. For example, there may be a lot of heat, residue, including grease, metal particles or wood shavings. Even food manufacturers can have flour and other small particles that become airborne.
These types of environments aren’t always conducive to digital signage technology.
We are going to discuss 3 things that can be done to ensure that your digital signage network will last for years to come.
1. Extenders – To guarantee that your digital signage is going to last a long time, one option is to mount your players in a server room or office that is clean and air conditioned. The job of the extender is to amplify your video signal for very long runs. Extenders consist of a transmitter box that connects to the receiver box at the LCD display with a CAT5e cable. When considering this option, you must take into account two things, a.) the additional cost of the extender hardware and b.) the loss in quality on the LCD side. While the extenders for HDMI formats do much better than the older analog formats, nothing compares to a short video cable with no conversions or compression distorting your video signal.
2. PC Enclosures – By mounting the player close to or directly behind the LCD display, shorter cable runs can be achieved, meaning better video quality. This option doesn’t come without it’s challenges. Since most digital signage players are PCs or are mini-PCs, they won’t last long in a poor air quality environment. This is such a problem, that companies such as ITS Enclosures make special enclosures for PCs to stay clean and cool when on the factory floor. The cost of this solution must be added to the overall budget of the digital signage solution
3. Solid State Player – This option is ideal but is hard to find for the manufacturing factory floor application. Solid-State means that there are no moving parts in the player so air quality becomes a non-issue, for the most part. Even though a digital signage player is solid-state, in most cases, heat could still be an issue. When searching, you would want a solid-state player that draws the least amount of electricity thereby running cooler.
In addition to the three recommendations, it is advisable that commercial grade LCD screens be used.
Click here for more information on the SF-200 solid-state digital signage player. With solutions like the SF-200, not only will you have an environmentally agnostic digital signage player, but you will have software, the Noventri Suite, that can pull from the databases needed for the manufacturing application. You will not need to pay the additional cost for video extenders or enclosures and it will last for years.
