Build a Departure Board Display on Any Screen

A Solari departure board is the mechanical split-flap board you remember from old airports and train stations, where every character physically flips through the alphabet until it lands on the right letter. Festaboard rebuilds that in software: a grid of 6 rows and 22 columns — 132 tiles in total, the exact layout of a physical Vestaboard — where each tile flips through characters until your message settles into place.

Every flip is paired with a real split-flap sound, modeled on an actual board but softened so it reads as pleasant rather than the harsh clatter of a busy station concourse. Watch a full line resolve and you get the same satisfying cascade an airport departure board gives you when a gate change ripples across the display.

Instead of flight numbers and gates, you fill the board with whatever you want. Type custom text into any of the six rows and it flips into place across the 22 columns, arrivals-board style. Because the grid matches a real Vestaboard, short words and tidy columns look the most authentic — the same constraint that gives station boards their clean, blocky character.

Per-cell color tiles let you build the signage details that sell the look: a colored header row, a divider, or accent blocks in white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple. Five themes — Classic Amber, Terminal Green, Clean White, Cool Blue, and Warm Red — set the overall era, from a warm amber airport board to a cool blue modern display.

Press F and Festaboard hides all site chrome, leaving just the board filling the screen — the quickest way to turn a monitor or TV into a train station flip board. It runs on laptops, desktops, tablets, smart TVs, and single-board computers, including Raspberry Pi models from a Pi 3A up to a Pi 5, so a spare screen in a hallway can become a permanent departures display.

For a screen that runs all day, add ?kiosk=1 to a share link for kiosk mode: no chrome, low-motion animation, sound off by default, and a screen Wake Lock that keeps the display from sleeping. Turn on slide rotation and the board cycles between your main message and saved slides on an interval you choose, from 5 up to 120 minutes, so it keeps changing like a board updating its next departures. Add the live Clock integration and it shows the current time, day, and date in 12- or 24-hour format, updating on its own like a station clock.

The arrivals-board style is a natural fit for events. Build a fake departure board that welcomes guests by name, points to the bar and dance floor as if they were gates, or lists the night's schedule across the 132 tiles. Toggle public sharing to get a read-only link at festaboard.com/b/<token> that anyone can open with no account, then cast or load it on the venue screen.

At home, a hallway board is a low-effort way to enjoy the split-flap aesthetic every day — a rotating quote, the day's plan, or a message for whoever walks past. Save a few slides, set a rotation interval, and let the board flip through them. More live sources such as Weather, Crypto, Spotify, and Countdown are coming soon; for now the Clock and TrustMRR integrations are live, and everything else runs on the custom text you write.