So here is a little update on my project.
With the tip of andrewnorth for the plug labels at the back I came to scale model decals which you apply with water. You can get sets of individual letters which I used. It’s a bit tedious to get the letters all in line but the result is great.
After playing around a little bit with the 0.96" display I rather found it too small to read from the couch or near it as the system is standing on a lower shelf under the TV. I started looking at the 2.42" OLEDs. They obviously use a different driver (SSD1309) however seem to be compatible with SSD1306 so I ordered on from AZDelivery. At many of those you seem to have to move a resistor (R4 to R3) and bridge a contact (R5) at the PCB in order to make it work with I2C. So I gave it a try but the display remained black and with the i2cdetect command I couldn’t find its address either.
Eventually I found a German community where someone pointed out the specialities with these OLEDs and that the RES pin has to be connected as well in order to make it work. Since there doesn’t seem to be a way to control the RES pin on the RPI easily he seems to have found a different solution.
He used a 18kOhm resistor between VCC and RES and a 47nF foil capacitor (must be foil) between GND and RES. His statement was that the RES pin must be first connected to GND and then to VCC which he realized with this wiring.
https://www.3d-druck-community.de/thread-21929.html
I thought I’d give it try. What else shall I do? And see there it works! The only thing I had to adapt in the pydPiper page file was the volume change bar. The size seems to have caused the image to flicker which I could solve by just shrinking it by some pixels. I have no explanation for this. The rest works fine.
With the new display I of course also needed a new solution for the front panel. Since I already drilled holes into the old panel for the LEDs I rather wanted to replace it with a new one without so many LEDs and the OLED in the center instead. Somewhere in a thread here I stumbled upon https://www.schaeffer-ag.de/ who can produce front panels by your needs if you create the 3D model with their software. A bit pricy for a single panel but the quality is perfect, it has colored engravings and I’m quite happy how it ended up.
