Excellent news! I'll try and give it a try this weekend, I've been busy collecting parts to build my bluetooth controller for these boards, recieved solder stencils the other day, just waiting on about 4 more things before i can put them in the toaster. I also discovered a possible design problem in my controller, I built it to handle only about 1A, but 3-4 displays will require 2-4A, so I'm working on a different layout that can use a larger capacity battery. I'm about 1/3 done building my custom 9616 display, I'll attempt the code on the 3 displays I've got on hand in the mean time while I continue building. 384x 0603 resistors and 12x 52 pin TQFP's are painful to hand-solder 
not to mention that I'm checking every connection by multimeter by hand before soldering the displays in. Needless to say, I will not be building multiples of these displays.