Make a Split-Flap Display Online, Right in Your Browser

A split-flap display is a mechanical sign built from rows of small tiles. Each tile carries a stack of printed flaps, and a motor rotates the stack until the right letter, number, or color lands face-up. When dozens of tiles flip at once you get the signature ripple of movement and the soft clatter that made these boards famous in stations and airports.

They are often called Solari boards after Solari di Udine, the Italian company that popularized them from the 1950s onward. The style never really went away, and modern desk versions like the Vestaboard brought it back into homes and offices. Festaboard gives you the same 6x22 grid look on any display you already own, so you can enjoy the flip board display effect without buying a physical unit.

Making a split-flap board online takes about a minute. Open Festaboard in any browser, type your message onto the 6x22 grid of 132 character tiles, and watch each cell flip into place. Pick a theme, drop in colored tiles where you want emphasis, and you have a finished board.

Everything runs client-side in the browser, so there is nothing to install for the core experience and it is free. When you like what you see, press F to go fullscreen: the site chrome hides and only the grid remains, ready for a wall or a TV.

A split-flap display is as much about motion and sound as it is about text. Festaboard models a real split-flap flip sound, tuned to be softer and more pleasant than a harsh station board, and you can mute it any time with the M key.

You also control the motion. Add ?anim=full to the URL for the complete flip animation, ?anim=lite for fewer steps, or ?anim=off to swap text instantly on very low-power devices. The board respects your operating system's reduced-motion setting automatically, so it calms down when you ask it to.

Once your board looks right, fullscreen mode (F) gives you a clean wall display. For an always-on screen, turn on public sharing to get a read-only link at festaboard.com/b/<token> that anyone can open with no account, then append ?kiosk=1 for kiosk mode: no chrome, low-motion animation, sound off by default, and a screen Wake Lock so the display never sleeps. Edits you make from the dashboard push to the screen in about a second, no reload needed.

Because it is just a browser page, it runs on laptops, desktops, tablets, smart TVs, and single-board computers in kiosk mode, from a Raspberry Pi 3A with 512MB of RAM up to a Pi 5, as well as RK3568-based Android displays. You can also install it as a PWA with Add to Home Screen. In fullscreen you can rotate between your main board and saved slides on an interval from 5 up to 120 minutes.

Real Solari boards updated themselves, and Festaboard can too. The Clock integration shows live time, day, and date in 12-hour or 24-hour format, auto-updating on the grid. If you run a SaaS, the TrustMRR integration pulls live MRR, growth percentage, and customer count from a slug so your board reflects the numbers in real time.

More live sources are coming soon, including Weather, Crypto, Spotify, Home Assistant, Google Calendar, Countdown, and Datafast. Those are not available yet, but the two integrations above work today and are enough to give a static message board a living, station-board feel.