Electronic Notice Board with Enhanced Features

Notice boards play a vital role in day-to-day life and are constructively used in various places. Using manual paper-based noticeboards at universities, and public spaces like hospitals, bus stations, and transport hubs has become a tedious task to perform daily, especially when frequent notice updates are required. There is also a risk of false notices being posted on these manual noticeboards if not secured properly. With the advancement in technologies over the last decade, electronic noticeboards have gained widespread attention due to their simplicity, flexibility, low cost, and rapid response, and are becoming an essential element for relaying messages or notices in such places. This article proposes a solar-powered wireless electronic noticeboard using an ESP8266 microcontroller. A webpage has been developed to instantly update the message or notice on the electronic noticeboard via Wi-Fi communication. To prevent unauthorized messages or notices being posted, the proposed system is password-protected and requires authentication from the users to access the webpage. The proposed system has several features that give users greater flexibility such as retrieving the current message or notice being displayed on the noticeboard, providing an option to specify a time frame for which a message or notice should be displayed, and providing an option to mark the message as an emergency message or notice, so that the alert is highlighted on the notice board for quick attention. The system also integrates a sleep mode feature which reduces its power consumption. The proposed system is low-cost and offers better efficiency and security over manual noticeboards.