WS2801 with Arduino RGB LED Display

I have started playing with individually programmable LED’s in a strip, using an Arduino for programming.

The chipset I went with was WS2801 from Alibaba.

With a bit of magic, I wrote a simple C# program that would send images to the arduino over UDP, and the arduino would then display them on the screen.

Unfortunately the Arduino used the same SPI interface for the network as it did the LEDs, so I went with the software SPI library from adafruit. This limited my refresh rate somewhat, and the following videos show the update rate with about 480 pixels.

The ultimate goal is to use to to display lap counts from my Relay for Life RFID lap counter.