I'm trying to restore this old Futaba VFD from a discarded 80s tape deck and the multiplexing is driving me insane. The grid scanning frequency is supposed to be around 100Hz but I am getting terrible ghosting between adjacent digits. Even after adding pulldown resistors to the grid lines, the previous digit still slightly glows when the next one fires. It is probably a duty cycle issue with my microcontoller code or maybe the cheap level shifters I used are too slow to dischage the grid capacitance. Dealing with these ancient displays is a nightmare because the documentation is basically nonexistent and you have to spend hours guessing the pinout and grid arrangements just to get a dim, flickering mess. If anyone has a reliable hardware blanking circuit that doesn't involve buying overpriced specialized driver ICs, please let me know. Paying twenty bucks for a Maxim chip just to display four numbers is something I refuse to do.