Electromechanical bus route sign

Hi,

I am trying to track down any information on how electromechanical bus
route signs work. To start off I am not sure of how they are refered to
exactly, but what I am thinking of are the route name displays found at
the front of city buses, that are yellow when 'active' and 'black' when
flipped. If you have anything that could help me with this I would
appreciate it.

Thanks

Andre

 

Hello

I have some of these readout devices, they came from Ferranti in the
UK. There are others making this type of display. My units were 7 inch
character ht, and operate from plus or minus 12 volts. Momentary pulse
of course, but will stay in the last state actuated.

I built my signs into a time of day display with six digits, hours,
minutes & seconds. To drive them required some smarts, an 8051
microcontroller did the job. Fed the processor with serial data with
the first part of byte as digit position and second part of byte as
data. Six words would set it to any time of day dynamically.

cheers
kw