>on your power supply ... I've found that, in some cases, the load on the contrast pin is more than I initially thought the entire LCD module should use.
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You're not talking about display contrast vs current are you? Just checking.
When you say in some cases, is that referring to some manufacturer? Or something I can't avoid.
It sounds like something that should be in the datasheet, is it? I'd hate to lay out $30 plus S & H for some LCDs to find out they ate power.

?Further, it won't make for a very good looking device unless you use two 8-character displays, which are not common. That will take 15 signals, since you need 13 common signals and an "E" signal for each. It's certainly easier to manage.
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I guess I'd stick with what I've got for now, and go ahead with the final product when I find the right LCDs.

>Often, they're hard to read and the characters are too small. (Don't overlook the programmable character set, since that might be larger with a little creative help.) Without a backlight, it will be hard to read, especially in bright sunlight, as at the park.
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Good idea about the programmable character set.

>I was kind-of wanting to see the finished product. Coding it should take at most a day, debugging, at most a week, and thorough testing no more than a year. What I had in mind was a nice, WW-II-era-looking thing done in beautifully finished teak, walnut, or mahogany, with classic knobs on the switches and, wrinkle-finished black metal bezels around the half-inch-tall 7-segment displays. All the electronics should be entirely happy to operate from 4.5-volt batteries, so there'd be no loss in a regulator. The pushbuttons would be on a longish metal bar with a fulcrum to be inside the box, with an optical interrupter used to provide bounce-free indication of which button was last pushed.
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Are you thinking about the early radios?
I'm leaning more to the project box version, especially if I want to keep it flexible vis-a-vis the LCDs.
You've reminded me that there'll have to be a "whose move it is" indicator, and if I'm using those power hungry LCDs I won't be able to use a LED. That's very unfortunate, maybe too much so. Could even be a project buster. The commercial clock I've got has LED indicators that are quite bright, but then that would have optimized LCDs.

>Now, you may have had something else in mind ... it is, after all, YOUR project.
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It started out my project, but with all the help I've received from this forum I don't see it that way anymore!

Peter