Calculator cyberdeck update

Hey, cyberspaceans! Once again, much water has flown under the bridge since the last time I talked about my cyberdeck project, so here I am once again (but this time with a request... maybe? More on this later).

Since the last time I posted about this, I made an important design change: I decided against attempting to emulate a one-line segmented display; this was for the simple reason that a UI based on a single line of barely-legible characters proved too uncomfortable to use (who could've known!) to outweigh the novelty factor. Instead of this, I opted for using the OLED screen as a 4-line alphanumeric display, based on code page 437 and the VGA font (though it would be trivial to implement any bitmap font with a suitable size and any 8-bit character set). This makes the UX pretty nice on the display front, although the 2Hz refresh rate of my I2C display leaves much to be desired.

Speaking of hardware, I have done all the work required to make it a functional prototype, complete with a perfboard keypad and some lithium batteries, and am now in the software development phase. However, it has been in development hell for about a month, and I believe this project has surpassed my programming skills (at least in C++, since I am using an Arduino Nano ESP32). Because of this, if anyone out here finds the project interesting enough that they would like to help somehow, please get in touch! I haven't done so yet, but I can put the source code up on Github or something like that.

Importantly, in the spirit of open source, you wouldn't just be helping me complete my own project (I recognise it's kind of selfish to ask for something like that, heck, I think this might be kind of selfish already, and sorry if it is). The software is pretty easy to adapt to any combination of an alphanumeric display (at least one with approximately similar dimensions and adequate software support, e.g U8g2), a keypad and the aforementioned Arduino device, so anyone with enough patience to combine these components could make their own simple cyberdeck thing with this OS. (Perhaps even housed in a calculator case, like I have!)

Finally, here's some images of the deck; the case is an Elektronika B3-34, a calculator from the late 80s.