Does Anyone Own A Vestaboard?

Looking for a "conversation piece" for a new basement remodel and was intrigued by the Vestaboard.

https://www.vestaboard.com/

It is both techie and retro at the same time and is WAAAY overcomplicated for being a "message board"..... and I think I would love it for just those reasons.

But.... the price.... It is in the "Do I really want to start selling internal organs to science to fund "wall art" price range.

Just wanted to see if anyone here on TW might actually have one of these. If so, is it still worth is after you have had it for a while? Any problems with it? Does the novelty wear off and the sound just get annoying over time?

Looking forward to hearing from anyone with firsthand experience.

 

I've seen where people have repurposed old train station ones for home or business use. Cool idea. The novelty would wear off quickly for me unless I could use it at work and put up daily messages or something.

 

Well, from what I can tell, you can setup "sets" of messages that display during the day, plus there is an app where your (or anyone else you have authenticated) can post their own messages to the board. It also appears to accept RSS feeds from your favorite internet news/weather sites. It is Google Home / Alexa compatible. Additionally you can use it with IFTTT so you could have it display "The wife just turned into the subdivision" right before she pulls into home.

 

For my home - hard pass. Ain't nobody got time for changing "cutesy sayings" <I wrote that line before I looked up the price. For my house ? >

For my work, where we have a LOT of digital signage, - - - wait, what? They want $2,850 ???!!!! oh FUCK no. The signs we use cost under $1,000 installed, and are infinitely flexible. Want to display text, no problem. Pictures, yup can do that too. Text and pictures, we can do that too. Oh and videos, not a problem.

Bottom line, they signs are nice and I hate them.

 

For almost $3k?

 

So much for me showing this thread to my wife to show her what a good idea this was....

 

Didn't expect to see this here

Yes -- I do have a Vestaboard. I jumped onboard when the launched their Kickstarter several years ago. Received mine a couple of months back. I really love it. Some brief notes:

- I was miffed when it appeared to have 3-4 dead/flakey cells. Then I read their support pages. They'd just been knocked slightly out of their sockets in transit. I re-seated them (easy) and it's worked 100% since. I usually change the display once a day.

- The Vestaboard phone app works, but is pretty limited. Instead, go to web.vestaboard.com and use the web interface. You can also see what sort of data integration plug-ins are available.

- Speaking of integration plug-ins, it's a weak selection. They really need to step on the gas with that stuff. That's a big selling point they tout.

- I'm a little bit nervous about it needing a cloud-based internet connection to work. When you configure the display, you aren't communicating locally with your board directly. If the company goes belly-up, what then?

- Given the point above, I've applied for API / developer keys. Haven't received them yet. I'm also going to put it behind a proxy server and see if I can sniff the communications; see if I can get it to use an unsecured connection for testing. API documentation is on the web.vestaboard.com site for nerding out.

Overall -- really happy with it. REALLY well packed for shipping. I personally love the clacky-clacky nostalgia (one of the reasons I bought it), but I could see where it would be annoying if you had the thing update many times a day.

 

Thanks for the reply. That really helps. My daughter is getting married next week (all you TikTok and Instagram folks can look up Cost_n_Mayor) and it turns out that weddings are EVEN MORE expensive than the VestaBoard. As such, this got shoved out for re-consideration in 2022. Hopefully there will be some clarification on needing "the cloud" to work and some more plug-in's. I am happy that it seems to have kept it's magic with you and that you are still happy with your purchase. That certainly makes it a bit easier to pull the trigger on this in the future.