That would be pretty sweet. It really does make a difference with readability. Actually even photos show up more clearly.
Need to figure out how to actually cleanly do the upgrade though without ruining the original device. It would be really hard to do it consistently with the hardwood enclosure. But it might be possible to get it working with some tinkering on a case-by-case basis…
FYI, the inspiration for the new display actually came from a community thread here:
In theory you could get some LED diffusion acrylic from Adafruit and print out this grid:
Sandwich all that together and you’re good to go! But the catch is, the LED display, the grid, and the diffuser acrylic all need to be sandwiched together very closely and accurately. We had to redesign the case to make it work consistently.
The other gotcha is the grid itself has to be very accurate. The 3D print success rate was fairly low for early prototypes. We got a higher 3D print yield by using a high-end resin printer and using flexible resin that could make a nice “screen sandwich”. In production we’ll be using injection molding to make the grid accurately, but sadly the Gen 2 grid won’t fit into Gen 1 without modification.
To summarize… I think it would be possible to pull this off with a few hours of effort on a case-by-case, but it’s not super straightforward. I’ll keep kicking it around though and see if I can make it work.