OpenHarrier

I discovered that the ssd1306 OLED i2c display, which has 128 x 64 pixel resolution, is the perfect size for replicating the com 1 and 2 radio preset display windows as well as the UFC scratchpad display.

The real AV-8B UFC displays are made with VFD (vacuum florescent displays) that are not made anymore. Those displays are a relatively unique design in that they operate like a 16 segment per character display or 7 segment per character display depending on which character position it is. There are a couple of things that make these displays unusual. Each segment is made up of 3 dots rather than a single, solid segment. This is the same as on the ODU displays.

We have searched long and hard, and nobody makes ot sells these very unique displays anymore. Existing segment LED displays do not have dots and none of these displays can support the same look as is on the Harrier. They can function and are usable, but it will not match the look of the real thing.

The closest we came were custom LED displays made by a Chinese company on behalf of TekCreations, which has them for the F-18 UFC. These displays do look good, but have the wrong number of characters and sizes for the Harrier.

The holy grail are the OLED displays I mentioned in the beginning of this post. After some extensive experimentation, I was able to mimic the VFD displays with their dot patterns by utilizing 5 pixels to represent each dot. I wrote Arduino code to fully replicate the fonts for both the 16 segment characaters and the 7 segment characters. These OLED displays only have a white display. You can easily turn them green by utilizing a green filter. I bought a pack of green gels used for spotlights and this worked perfectly.

This is one of the 2 com radio preset displays, 3D printed with the green gel tonchange the color to green (turned on its side):