The advent of the Arduino brought the world of microcontrollers to hobbyists, students, and artist the world over. Right now we’re in the midst of a new expansion in hobbyist electronics with the Raspberry Pi, but we can’t expect everyone to stay in the comfortable, complex, and power-hungry world of Linux forever, can we? Eventually all those tinkerers will want to program a microcontroller, and if they already have a Raspberry Pi, why not use that?
[Kevin] wanted to turn his Raspi into an AVR development workstation, without using any external programmers. He decided to use the Raspi’s SPI port to talk to an AVR microcontroller and was able to make the electrical connections with just a few bits of wire an a handful of resistors.
For the software, [Kevin] added support for SPI to avrdude, available on his git. Theoretically, this should work with any AVR microcontroller with the most popular ATMegas and ATtinys we’ve come to love. It doesn’t support the very weird chips that use TPI programming, but it’s still extremely useful.
Nice and very useful hack!!
Awesome job, man!
I flashed a router with the RasPi…
This looks like a useful hack.. Can’t wait for the occasion to arrise
OOOOOOOO! This looks very useful. Too bad I use PIC microcontroller these days.
This post inspired me to document the programmer that I made for my DeskClock boards – They use an AtMega169, an I used a Raspberry Pi – It was a fun exercse, and has produced a very usefull product
http://www.instructables.com/id/A-Programming-Jig-for-our-DougsWordClockcom-DeskC/
Neat!
This is was a big hurdle for me when I was in school :P
LOL, the article poster believes arduino brought microcontrollers to the little guy.
Some people will never learn.