The main controller board is an off-the-shelf Parallax Quickstart board. I designed and built a custom shield that provided a power supply for the project and driver outputs (TC4427) for the LED strings. Though we didn't use it, the board also holds a microSD socket to allow show data to be stored. 

My WS2801 driver is written in Propeller Assembly (PASM). The main animation program is written in Spin (the native, high-level language of the Propeller).