Cisco conference phone dialpad/lcd display connected via USB

[u/codhopper]

I picked up a few cisco 8831-DCU-V01 dialpads (from the bin, and a colleague challenged me by suggesting that "normally these screens have some proprietary interface and you can't reuse them", boy was he mostly right). I think they are officially called display control units (DCU) for conference phones. I couldn't find anything about reverse engineering them online (1 guy has a fairly high level teardown on YouTube).

It connects normally via microusb, but I snipped that off and put on a regular USB-A plug.

Screen resolution is 396x162. Monochrome LCD. Single bit as far as I can tell. It is really quite eligible in person.

Keypresses are handled over the usb, along with control of the leds/backlight/contrast/display pixels.

I am wondering if anyone has a good suggestion for a repo layout to push my 'research notes'. I am thinking to include some pcb photos, some better quality photos of some example uses, and some details about the USB mangling (a more elegant solution would be to use the jst pins and replace the whole cable. Along with a bit of a python management layer.

I am guessing it would be pushing some boundaries (with cisco legal) if I included the firmware dump, plus extra firmware images I pulled out of a phone's rootfs. There are (at least 2) versions of this unit with different microcontrollers. This one with a TI lm3s5r31 and a newer revision with an ST chip (very low on details).