Next up I started playing with the hardware I wanted to use.  I bought basically all of the kit I could from Adafruit because they are really great about making good documentation and solid libraries for everything they sell.  (I'm not affiliated with them in any way, other than being a huge fan.  Seriously, they do good work.)

So the good news was that I was able to more or less snap everything together and write a bit of Arduino code and have it Just Work.  (I still need to stick the code on Github, which I'll do eventually or as soon as anyone asks for it, whichever comes first.)

The accel could use either I2C or SPI, but the display only has SPI support, so that made the choice of which interface to use pretty easy.