While the Raspberry Pi has very good support for an I2C bus, a lot of very cool chips – including the in system programmer for just about every ATtiny and ATmega microcontroller – use an SPI bus.

Quick, how do you wire up an SPI bus between a microcontroller and a peripheral? SCK goes to SCK, MISO goes to MISO, and MOSI goes to MOSI, right? Yeah. You’ll need to throw in a chip select pin ...