Open or Closed? Signage for the Modern Age

Life is complicated, weather is unpredictable, and sometimes a physical sign needs a digital upgrade. Whether booking a conference room, running a retail small business, or displaying a teacher's office hours, sometimes it's not just about having the sign, but being able to change the sign.

Simple Signage Solution

Imagine you are Joan, the owner of a beloved boutique pet store in Michigan. As a small business owner, you are on-site everyday tending to your customers, but today the weather had other plans. You are completely snowed-in.

You quickly login to your TRMNL account, head to your playlist, and unhide your Unexpected Closure message. Thanks to our smart playlist features, you've already marked this item as Important so it will show instead of any other plugins in the playlist, regardless of their schedule. You sigh, make a mental note to re-hide it again tonight, and get back inside to warm up.

We built the Simple Open Signage plugin to meet that need.

For your everyday use case, you could use the same plugin and install multiple copies, each one representing a screen you want to display (one during business hours, one during normal closed hours). Then, using the playlist scheduler, you assign when those screens should show. Setting your TRMNL device in device settings to a 15 minute refresh time will keep it close to in-sync.

Calendar-Powered Signage

Displaying your calendar for yourself is easy with TRMNL, but displaying a calendar that is beneficial to others takes a bit more finesse. With the recent release of our plugin_instance_select field, we expect new recipes to be published to make it easy to take a calendar plugin (ical, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, CalDav, Outlook, etc) and re-use it through this new feature, as easy as choosing it from a dropdown menu.

One example is Next Calendar Event, a straight-forward display of what's next and when.

Like anything backed by a calendar, changing the schedule is as easy as adding or removing events from the calendar, wherever you are, and seeing those changes reflected on the calendar based on your refresh schedule (as fast as every 5 minutes with the optional TRMNL+).

However, you can also integrate with providers like Reenio, who offer an online reservation system and compatible TRMNL recipe. We expect more integrations will be developed soon.

So What Are You Waiting For?

Volume discounts? Published and waiting.

Case Studies? Middlebury College would like a word.

Your credit card? Well, that's on you, but we're sure you'll find it soon.