8 years on, it's about time we got an answer!

I did this using pyftdi and the .exchange method:

address = 'ftdi:///1'

spi = SpiController()

spimode =0

spi.configure(address)

slave = spi.get_port(cs=0, freq=1e6, mode=spimode)

dup_write = b'\x18\x00' #sending two bytes. This is what you are writing to your device

dup_read = slave.exchange(dup_write, duplex=True)