thanks, @arturo and @bakercp. I haven't tried with the rPi 2 yet. I'll look into that. @drakko I'll look into this as well. I just emailed the company to see if they support the sm16716 chip, which is what i'm using.
As a side note... the sm16716 is inexpensive, but has a funky protocol that doesn't depend on byte-sized packets, which makes it difficult to use SPI libraries (i believe wiringPi's SPI stuff is all byte-based)... addon can be found HERE