First I coded a shift_out function which would turn a byte into a series of clocked pulses. Then I work on a method to mask off and encode the red,green and blue values from an array of integers representing colours so I can create bitmaps for each colour component. Having done this allowed me to describe a line pattern using abbreviated colour names re,ye,gr,cy,bl,pu,bk,wh making easier to create images.

An image array is then converted into a structure to store the address, value and frame of each led which is sent to the the shiftout function which creates the line pulses for the led display.At this point I could see my patterns being displayed but because they werent synchonised I had to play around with array sizes so I could get images slowly floating in different directions this also showed me ~200 columns could be displayed in one revolution.