where to next?

Very nice, forced perspective was brain tingly trying to adjust these monkey eyes. I rarely find a need to chime in however talent deserves a notice. just when you think you've seen it all. Internets says no. My fascination with unique art displays started with Robert Rauschenberg and his largest single exhibit  in 95 or 6 ,sadly he missed these golden years of tech. He'd been just as impressed as I am no doubt. Tinker on sir Tinker on.

thanks for chiming in and the Robert Rauschenberg reference. indeed there are many greats that had not nearly the tools we do now.

Great. Thanks.

I've got a 343 stepper motor art project running off a PC parallel port and I'm going to be updating it to run off a BBBlack. I'm thinking about rewiring the interface to make one giant chain instead of seven sortof giant chains. http://hackaday.io/project/565-controlling-343-stepper-motors-from-linux 

I'll take a peek at github when I get back to it.

one giant chain. i would not recommend it exactly. it had its advantages of running off the beaglebone black's hardware spi so getting data moving fast enough hasn't been an issue and im able to maintain above 60fps.

i incorporated the the use of 74HCT595 buffers in line every 3-4 tlc5947 . you'll see them in the last photo

more detail about the trials and troubleshooting of a long shift register chain can be found here: http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&p=294919

ultimately, the NSL (http://032.la/) mailing list and DenHac (http://denhac.org/) yielded the most help. Many thanks to them!

Can you describe the BeagleBone Black SPI setup and control?

Do you have one GIANT serial shift chain or several with separate chip selects.

one giant chain. see the above comments on how i was able to get it to work with several inline 74hct595 buffers

the spi was a fairly straightforward conversion of existing spi rgb led code and supporting a brightness calculation to convert to grey scale from rgb. this allowed me to use more standard opc clients for testing.