This is only a slight update.

The mechanical space in the front panel of the radio permit only a limited number of different models of display.  The Vishay-Dale unit I want to use which fits nicely is very new, so new that it is nearly impossible to find.  I am getting one via a connection, but also found a LCD which will fit as well.  The reason I am so constrained is that I want a large display area yet there isn’t much room around that area in the front casting.

The LCD I want to try is a Newhaven Display NHD-12232KZ-NSW-BBW-P.  I have a couple on order from Digikey.  At this point I will write the driver code to handle both types of display and show pictures of both the older technology LCD and how it looks done in the new OLED technology.

As for fonts, I found a number of ones available in open source, in different XY pixel sizes, so I will be able to have the frequency in a large font and the channel and status info in a smaller font.  I’m still playing with design ideas for layout.

Both displays aren’t expected until sometime next week, and I might be too busy the end of next week going into the weekend to get to further development.  But after that, with all the holidays and days off I will have plenty of time.

I still want to set up an Arduino as a I2C bus monitor to dump all bus transactions to the PC.  This will require rewriting the wire.h library functions to operate in either promiscuous mode or with selectable filtering while not sending the acknowledge signal back to the master.  I’d also modify it to print the bus address before each transaction data.  Why do this?  Because I’d like to be able to display radio mode and this can be read out from one of the bus expansion chips which the mode switch connects to.  Who knows what else I can find.  I could also display when the radio is in a ham band (as a reminder) and what class of license segment as well.  Stuff like that.