Quote Originally Posted by Mike, K8LH View Post
Have you considered scanning rows instead of columns? This would increase the duty cycle from 1/18th to 1/8th which should improve brightness by increasing "average" LED current.
That would be nice, but I'd then have to use 8 transistors for the rows.
Bit late for this hardware, but if someone wanted to add that to a PCB design
I could certainly update the software.

The size of the display was really determined by the proto PCB I was using,
and it had to be a certain height to scroll letters of the LCD font I wanted.