TCM, you could make a 12 digit voltmeter with a PIC, but since the PIC has only 1024 resolution points it wont be much good after the first few digits. But the PIC has 5 ADC inputs, just with 2 of them you could make this;
12.75v 1.04A
which fits fine in 12 digits even including the 'v' and 'A' chars. You can also program it to do overvoltage indicators or errors etc, something you can't implement on a typical digital panel meter.
Re your 7-seg filament display, those are incredibly rare. You might want to google for the "calculator museum" a cool site, he lists just about every type of digit display there, but I don't think he shows your filament type.
Shimniok, sorry i missed your first post. I think one of these displays would look great as a "retro" text display, 'Start' 'finished' "cLean' 'Error' etc. Sweet project!
Dick, yeah they can display all the 6 hex characters and the 0-9 numerals. I glad that it renewed your interest, it did the same for me I guess. These displays (the Oatley ones) are nice in they look to be state of art as the last era of segment displays, National Semiconductor brand, gold plated, they are crystal clear, high brightness on low power even with low duty cycle. They are also very "sharp" as the clear bezel sits right over the led chip itself.
If you compare to a typical red LED alarm clock which are dull and murky, these are razor sharp with a beautiful intense red glow to the tiny led chips themselves. It REALLY doesn't come through in the photos...
(edit) I googled for caculator museum, there is more of them than I remember! But this is the page I was talking about;
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/calculator_displays.html