What the Board Does on Its Own

What the Board Does on Its Own

A flight board in a lobby runs without anyone standing in front of it. It alternates between departures and arrivals, moves through long lists, drops in your own slides, changes language, counts down to departure, lets old flights go and fetches fresh data. This article explains each of those movements: what triggers it, how fast it happens, and where you can adjust or switch it off.

Every screen is configured separately

There is no single settings page for all your boards. Each screen carries its own configuration, which you edit under Portal → Displays by opening the screen you want. The editor has six tabs: General, Design, Behavior, Content, White-Label and Preview & URL. The settings described here are spread across the first three. Design replaces the former Appearance tab; every control that used to live there is still available, now grouped into sections such as Flight list, Motion and Screen.

Changes stay in your browser until you press Save. As soon as you edit something, a bar at the bottom of the page says "You have unsaved changes." and offers Discard and Save. Only one setting belongs to the whole account rather than to a single screen, and that is the data refresh interval, because it comes from your plan.

If you would like a tour of the editor itself, read The display editor. For the styles and the live preview in the Design tab, see Design your board.

How often flight data refreshes

The refresh interval decides how often a board asks our servers for new flight data. It is set by your subscription plan and cannot be changed on a screen:

A gate change therefore appears on a Premium screen within five minutes and on a Basic screen within the hour. Because the interval follows the plan, every screen you run refreshes at the same rate. If you need faster updates, see Change Your Plan.

Between two refreshes the board does not stand still. Once a minute it recalculates the countdown, marks flights whose time has passed and drops those that are long gone, so the list stays accurate even on a Basic screen.

Direction, columns and alternating

What the board shows is set in Design → Flight list. Shows picks departures, arrivals or both, and a new screen starts on departures. Columns picks the layout: one column on every plan, two columns from Pro, three columns on Premium.

Whether the board alternates between departures and arrivals is set in Design → Motion, and the rule depends on the layout and the device:

Show flights for sets how long each flight phase stays on screen. It appears once the board alternates or shows your own slides, accepts 10 to 600 seconds, and is 120 seconds for a screen you have not changed.

If you want a board that never changes direction, set Shows to departures or to arrivals.

Your own slides in the cycle

Info slides need Pro or higher: Basic has none, Pro allows up to five and Premium is not limited. You switch them on for a screen in Design → Flight list, and in the Content tab you choose which slides this screen shows. Slides are inserted after each flight phase:

Each slide carries its own duration, and in the Content tab you can give it a different duration for this screen. A slide without a valid duration stays for ten seconds. The running order under Portal → Content shows the sequence and the total length a guest actually sees; see The running order. Slides are never shown in website mode.

The departures and arrivals tabs

A single-column board that shows both directions displays a Departures / Arrivals tab strip under the header. On a TV it is only an indicator: it shows which list the board is currently on and moves along with the alternation. On a touch screen or website with Alternate automatically switched off, the tabs are buttons, and a guest can tap between the two lists. There is no hidden timer behind them any more; the view stays where the guest left it.

Device mode: TV, touch or website

Under General → This screen, the Device setting decides which features a screen has at all. TV is available on every plan, Touch from Pro and Website on Premium.

TV is for a panel on a wall that nobody touches. Nothing pauses on interaction, and search is not available.

Touch is for an interactive panel. Any touch, scroll or key press pauses auto-scroll and alternating for 30 seconds, so a guest reading a list is not carried away. The footer also offers a pause button, which holds the board until it is tapped again or for at most five minutes, and a refresh button. Search can be switched on.

Website is for embedding the board on your own site. Mouse movement pauses it the same way, auto-scroll is off, and your own slides are not shown. Alternating follows the Alternate automatically switch, as on a touch screen.

Long lists: scrolling or turning pages

There is no fixed number of rows on a board. How many flights fit depends on the size of the screen and on the text size you choose under Design → Type & rows. When the list is longer than the screen, the board moves through it in one of two ways.

Scrolling is the default and is set on the Behavior tab under Auto Scroll. It is on for a new screen and not available in website mode. Scroll Speed runs from very slow to very fast on a five-step scale and sits on "slow" unless you change it. Pause at Start/End decides how long the list rests at the bottom and again at the top before it scrolls once more: 30 seconds by default, anywhere from 0 to 300 seconds. The board starts scrolling straight away when a list appears.

Pages is the airport-style alternative and needs Pro. In Design → Motion, set Long lists to Pages. The board then shows one full page at a time with a small page indicator. Seconds per page accepts 6 to 60 seconds and is 12 by default, and Rows per page is either Automatic, which fits as many rows as the screen holds, or a fixed number of up to 20. While pages are on, the board does not scroll, but your auto-scroll settings stay saved for later. On a single-column board, a flight phase is extended to whole page cycles, so the board never switches direction in the middle of the list. The Transition setting in the same section adds a fade or slide between pages and phases from Pro; the split-flap effect needs Premium.

Countdown, departed flights and the time window

The board decides by itself which flights are current, and several of these rules can now be adjusted in Design → Flight list, under Times.

The Countdown shows "In 25 min", "Now" or "Departed" next to a flight and updates every minute. It is on by default and available on every plan. With Countdown from you can limit it to flights within a certain number of minutes, anywhere from 15 to 600; by default there is no limit.

Departed flights controls what happens once a flight's time has passed. With Dimmed, the default, the row stays on the board in muted colours for a short while, 15 minutes for departures and 30 minutes for arrivals, and then disappears. With Hidden, it leaves the board as soon as its time has passed. Both options are available on every plan.

Two further rules need Pro. Time window limits how far ahead the board shows flights, from 2 to 24 hours; at 24 hours the board shows everything it receives. Hide cancelled flights removes cancellations from the list instead of showing them with their status.

Language rotation

Under Behavior → Language Settings you choose which languages the board uses. Basic covers one language at a time, Pro covers two and Premium covers all 42. As soon as more than one is selected, the board takes turns, and Language Switch Interval sets how long each language stays: 60 seconds unless you change it, anywhere from 10 to 600 seconds.

From Pro you can instead show two languages at once. In Design → Languages, set Several languages to Bilingual, and the board keeps its main language while a smaller second line appears under headings and statuses. The rotation then stops. The details are in Set the languages and the weather for a display.

Night mode and screen care

A board that runs all day benefits from a little care, and the Design → Screen section collects these settings.

Pixel shift moves the whole picture by one pixel every 15 minutes within a tiny loop of at most two pixels, which protects panels against burn-in. It is available on every plan and off by default, but every new style switches it on. Safe margin adds 2.5 or 5 percent of space around the board for TVs that cut off the edges, and Screen mounted upright turns the board by 90 degrees for a TV on its side that cannot rotate its own picture.

Night mode needs Pro. Between two times, 23:00 and 06:00 by default, the board either dims, shows only the clock and the next flights in large type, or turns black. The times follow the display's clock, which is the airport's or the hotel's time depending on General → Airport and time, and a window may run across midnight. If both times are the same, night mode never starts. An emergency notice always appears above night mode. Night mode does not switch the TV itself off; power schedules stay on the TV or player. See Screen care for the full picture.

Settings reach the screen by themselves

You do not need to walk to the lobby and press F5. A running board fetches its configuration again every 20 seconds, so a change you save in the portal appears within about that long.

If a screen needs a complete fresh start, use Reload screen next to the display in Portal → Displays. The screen reloads itself on its next configuration check, usually within 20 seconds. When we publish a new version of the board, a screen keeps running the version it has until it is restarted or reloaded, unless you switch on Automatic updates in Design → Screen: At night reloads it inside the night-mode window (without night mode between 03:00 and 05:00), When nobody is using it after a minute without any touch or key press, so a guest using a touch screen is never interrupted. Boards in website mode and on guests' phones never reload by themselves.

Saving in the editor also reloads any copy of the board that is open in another tab of the same browser. That only reaches boards on the computer you are working on, not the lobby screen, which picks up the change through its regular check.

The previews

There are two previews, and both are careful not to pretend to be a real screen.

The Design tab has a live preview next to the controls that shows your unsaved draft at once. It opens as a still frame; Play lets it alternate and scroll, and a set of situations such as delays and cancellations, night mode, an announcement, an emergency notice or an empty board let you see those states on demand. Pixel shift is off in the preview, and night mode appears as a band.

The Preview & URL tab shows the saved board, and its links carry ?preview=1. That parameter keeps the board still: no alternating, no slides, no auto-scroll and no language changes. It also suppresses the heartbeat the board normally sends, so opening the editor never reports a dark lobby panel as online. The preview needs the screen to be active.

Besides ?display=, which names the screen, the board reads only two other parameters: ?preview=1 and ?view=mobile, the guest-phone view that the board's QR code opens. There is no parameter that overrides the refresh interval, holds a tab or switches off alternating.

When the connection drops

If the browser loses its network, or a configuration request fails, the board shows a small orange Offline Mode badge in the bottom corner and keeps displaying what it had. When the flight data is older than it should be, a note reading "Data may be delayed", together with the time of the last successful update, appears over the list. That happens when the last request failed, when the data came from the device's memory, or when it is older than two refresh cycles.

The board now also keeps a copy on the device. It remembers its last good settings for up to 24 hours and its last good flight list for up to 30 minutes, so a TV that restarts during an outage comes back with its board instead of an error. Flights older than 30 minutes are never shown, because their times would mislead. If the browser does not allow local storage, the board simply works without this copy. It keeps trying on its normal interval, and fresh data replaces the old as soon as a request succeeds.

On our side, every set of flight data is also kept as a spare copy for 24 hours, and if the upstream flight service is unavailable, that copy is served instead of an empty board. You can decide in Design → Footer whether the footer shows the "Updated" time always, only when the data is old, or never. For more detail, read What Happens When a Display Loses Its Internet Connection.

Telling whether a screen is actually running

The offline badge is what a guest sees. What you see is the status in Portal → Displays, and it works differently: each screen reports in every five minutes, and a screen is only called offline after twelve minutes of silence. Twelve rather than five, because a single missed report, such as a reload or a brief network blip, would otherwise mark a healthy screen as down.

A screen you have deactivated is a separate state. It is not an outage, and it does not fetch flight data at all. More than one screen covers the status list in detail.

Troubleshooting

The board never switches to arrivals. Check Shows in Design → Flight list. If it is set to both and the screen is a touch screen or website with one column, switch on Alternate automatically in Design → Motion; otherwise guests have to use the tabs.

My column assignment is ignored. Alternate all columns is on. Switch it off in Design → Motion, or use the Switch rotation off button next to the column assignment.

Departed flights stay on the board. With Departed flights set to Dimmed, a departure remains for 15 minutes and an arrival for 30 minutes after its time. Choose Hidden if you would rather see them go immediately.

The list does not move. Check that Auto Scroll is on in the Behavior tab and that the screen is not in website mode. If Long lists is set to Pages, the board turns pages instead of scrolling, and a list that fits on one page does not move at all.

Can I set the refresh interval or run rotation only at certain times of day? No. The refresh interval follows your plan, and alternating is either on or off. For the quiet hours, night mode is the closest option.

Next steps

Support

If something on a board moves in a way this article does not explain, write to info@lobbyflight.com. Support is available Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 CET.