A split-flap board that says whatever you type — a wedding welcome, tonight’s specials, a countdown to the trip, GONE FISHING. Every page of text becomes rows of physical-looking flaps that cascade into place letter by letter whenever the board changes. It can tell the time and count down to a date without touching the network: Departures makes no outbound request while it is running.
Your words. Lines are separated by | and pages by ||, and the /setup page builds that for you from a plain text box where a blank line starts a new page. Drop {clock}, {date} or {countdown:…} into a line and that spot keeps itself current, re-flipping only the cells that changed.
Anywhere, with nothing behind it. No account, no key, no upstream service that can disappear or start charging — the whole board is arithmetic on the URL. Self-hosted it is a read-only container; hosted it is a static page.
A board people read at a glance, not a page they study. Lines longer than the board are cut, never wrapped, the same way a real board would; dwell means seconds the page is readable, counted from when the last flap lands.
Setup
A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.
F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.
Configuration
Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at departures.livingkiosk.com/setup.
| Parameter | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
text | a demo page | | separates lines, || separates pages. /setup builds this for you. |
dwell | 8 | Seconds each page stays readable (3–3600). Ignored with one page. |
rows | 6 | 1–12 lines per page. |
cols | 22 | 8–40 characters per line; rows × cols tops out at 480. |
align | left | center — whole board, not per line. |
clock | 24 | 12 for AM/PM in {clock}. |
theme | classic | cream for cream flaps with black letters. |
bg | #0b0b0b | Colour behind the board (fleet-wide convention). |
speed | normal | slow or fast — how quickly each flap turns. |
sound | off | A soft clack. Never plays before you tap the board once — browsers block that. |
seed | — | Pins the cascade’s exact timing, mainly for screenshots and tests. |
dim | 0 | Black scrim over everything, 0 to 0.8 (fleet-wide convention). |
Departures is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.