The photo I originally uploaded shows an Adafruit NRF52840 Express board - this worked great for testing the display, but I wanted more GPIOs for scanning the whole keyboard matrix directly (14 column lines + 8 row lines).

I had previously ordered the Sparkfun Artemis ATP board (48 GPIOS!) in the hope to get close to the extremely low power usage numbers they are quoting (5mW). Probably not if I'm using that many GPIO lines, but if I could get even close it would be amazing. Currently it idles at around 4mA@3.3V, so 13.2mW ... 

That board sure took it's sweet time in the mail, but now that I have it I have been able to verify that I can get uLisp running on it, scan the keyboard matrix and read all the keys (from LISP). Success!

What hasn't gone great is getting the display to work with hardware SPI. I must have tried a hundred different combination of parameters but no luck yet. Are there some assumptions in the Adafruit libraries that don't apply to the Sparkfun board? No idea. For now I'll ignore that display updates are kind of slow, and plod on with the next step ...

 ... which is scanning the keyboard at regular intervals, doing debouncing and turning it in to a nice and neat sequence of keyup/down events. I am lucky to have some code to go by from the uLisp author's own very cool lisp badge project: http://www.technoblogy.com/show?2AEE

In parallel I'm 3D printing a very simple case for the display and breakout board. I learned the hard way that those FPC connectors are fragile, and ruined one 4.4" display - good thing I ordered extra. And hopefully I've learned my lesson now and the case will keep the next one safe.