The biggest limitation in the software implementation I described in the last log was bitbanging the spi. This of course enabled greater flexibility in gpio selection, but at the cost of max framerate. For the previous bitbang code, this meant that I was only able to get around 20Hz per display, writing to them interleaved (or 40Hz if only one display were used). I've since slightly modified the code to support hardware spi and with this I've measured framerates of up to 200Hz for a single display is possible (or 100Hz for two displays).

Once I've finished testing these changes I'll post the code in the files section. For now here's a video demonstration of the older bitbanged spi software.

Since filming this, I've moved to hardware spi and added two more buttons to allow adjusting brightness (mode and brightness settings are saved to nonvolatile eeprom).