AED: Electronic Billboards
Design services firm creates sophisticated electronics for many of the world's most spectacular billboards.
Mega-signage specialist Dynamic Digital Displays’ (D3) turned to Advanced Electronic Design (AED) to design display modules for one of the world’s most sophisticated electronic displays in the world for Walgreens in New York City. The multisided 17,000-square-foot wonder rises 340-feet high and wraps around three sides of the One Times Square building (the site of the New Year’s Eve ball drop).
For the D3 Walgreens project, AED designed a series of modules, most of which are 15 inches square. Each module includes an LED panel, Ethernet and power cables, and an AED-developed printed-circuit board containing a Xilinx FPGA, which controls the module’s LED display. This sign has about 10,000 of these 15-inch modules plus a couple thousand higher-resolution modules for inside the store.
To create the Walgreens spectacular, D3 assembled and stacked the LED modules into the desired shapes and interconnected them via network switches and an extremely sophisticated network of custom computers. These computers coordinate the modules to run synchronously and seamlessly from a custom-built control room. The system transmits 150 Gbytes of information to the array of display modules every 30 seconds.
Additional Information
- Excerpts taken from AED Makes Times Square Sparkle in the Xcell Journal, 2010 Customer Innovations Issue