Any suggestions to speed this up

[MetalOne]

Thanks.
Your suggestion worked with a slight tweak to the code.

def buildBitmap2(rawData, w, h):
    im = Image.fromstring("L", (w, h), rawData)
    im = im.convert("RGB")
    file = cStringIO.StringIO()
    im.save(file, "PPM")
    file.seek(0)
    return wxBitmapFromImage(wxImageFromStream(file) )

On my home computer, my frame rate went from 7fps to 27fps.
I had glanced at PIL earlier in the week and did not think it would
work.  Your post gave me some confidence that it would, so I looked
into it a little more.  PIL looks to be quite cool.

I tried getting your second suggestion with the Dibs to work, but I
can't seem to make them work with wxWindows.  I can't get access to
the underlying device context handle.

I also tried playing around with Array('c') and numarray.  Iterating
over these sequences was no faster than with list.  At least, it did
not change the frame rate.