Scarletmotion M5 LED Billboard Installation

Some of you may be aware that we write and maintain the software (and a small amount of hardware) that runs a network of LED advertising billboards for a company called Scarletmotion.

Scarletmotion have recently built two new screens on the M5 – they’re their biggest screens yet, and are over 9m high and 5m wide. Forced out of our usual comfortable office environment Lawrence spent two days in Birmingham on a scaffolding armed with a Macbook Pro, lots of warm clothing and a few cans of Red Bull to keep him going.

The screens are powered by Mac Minis running some really complicated software that we put together in-house allowing us to perform real-time monitoring on every aspect of their performance. With people’s advertising budgets at stake these systems need to run 24/7, no excuses. Luckily, our software is up to the job.

We ran into a few problems setting up the 3G backhaul connection that we’d chosen to use for this particular screen, and also discovered in the process that the one thing that fails on a Mac Mini when it gets really cold is it’s Wifi card. Resourcefulness paid off in the end and we figured out how to make the Mifi from 3 work as a virtual ethernet interface.

We’re still to get some really nice pictures of the screens themselves actually running from eye-level but in the meantime we’ve got a video of an exclusive peak behind the scenes of these two screens as well as a few pictures that Lawrence managed to grab.

If you’d like to find out more about opportunities to advertise with Scarletmotion (they have some amazing offers going in the first few weeks of these screens operating for both local and national businesses) enter your details below and they’ll be in touch.