The development of the Arduino brought the world of microcontrollers to hobbyists, students, as well as artist the world over. ideal now we’re in the midst of a new growth in hobbyist electronics with the Raspberry Pi, however we can’t expect everybody to stay in the comfortable, complex, as well as power-hungry world of Linux forever, can we? ultimately all those tinkerers will want to program a microcontroller, as well as if they already have a Raspberry Pi, why not utilize that?

[Kevin] wished to turn his Raspi into an AVR advancement workstation, without utilizing any type of outside programmers. He made a decision to utilize the Raspi’s SPI port to speak to an AVR microcontroller as well as was able to make the electrical connections with just a few bits of cable an a handful of resistors.

For the software, [Kevin] added support for SPI to avrdude, offered on his git. Theoretically, this must work with any type of AVR microcontroller with the most prominent ATMegas as well as ATtinys we’ve come to love. It doesn’t support the extremely odd chips that utilize TPI programming, however it’s still very useful.