6 years ago (when I was 12), I got my very first advance piece of electronic device. It's head unitof Sony CDX GT700D. A Car CD player. Back then I'm so stupid that I only desolder the VFD glass instead of just keeping entire module so I can reverse engineering later (RE not even a thing to me when I was 12 YO, so yeah just a kid). 4 years later I got another VFD Display made by Noritake Itron off an eBay for just 6 bucks plus 5 bucks for shipping from GB. FYI it's GU280X16-7000 (using the MN28016A VFD). That thing reminds me of the display take from head unit of stereo player, so I just take a look on the back of the glass and saw "MN15439A" and "Noritake Itron". I emailed them for datasheet but sadly they said that It's "Custom build" and datasheet is "Confidential". but it's turned out that the display pinout is already shown in the CDX GT700D's service manual and perfectly match with its sister VFD model MN14440A. Luckily I be able to obtain the full datasheet of MN14440A (as a ref for MN15439A) by again emailing to them. It takes me 5 years until I can build the power driver board, but trying to control it is still no luck.

Until couple of weeks ago (IIRC). I finally got the display to work with my STM8L with really crappy framerate due to 16MHz cpu and ~ 300 plus instruction to just process data and bit bang the SPI-likes bus. It's turned out that not only the pinout is match with MN14440A, It also using same 288-bit x3 shift register. this display is capable of displaying Grayscale image (this thing is damn complicated, I'm looking to find the solution without touching the FPGA).  soon after I got it working, I re write the STm32 driver using SPI + DMA, the SPI speed goes up to 18MHz! (and I believe that it can go further more that that). Right now I implemented the data sending, Frame buffer and ASCII printing features. also testing the SPI + DMA interface with host (host send 750 bytes of Frame buffer data, STM32 receive with RX DMA). 

Soon I will try the Grayscaling the display, by either using the GCP (Gradient Control Pulse) or sub-frame-ing.