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. [Louis] sent in a tutorial for getting hardware SPI on his Raspi, and even though it’s rather limited right now, it’s a step in the right direction.
Previously, [Brian Hensley] put up a tutorial for using the Linux SPI drivers with the Raspi. [Louis] wanted to play with SPI in Python, so he added a C extension to the spidev.c file (available here) that allows him to open an SPI connection, initialize, transfer, and close the connection.
After connecting an Arduino to the MOSI, MISO and SCK pins of his Arduino, [Louis] was able to transfer data from his Raspi over an SPI bus. It should be noted that a level shifter would be a really good idea here, but this is an excellent project if anyone would ever want to port AVRDude to Python.

http://hackaday.com/2013/01/06/hardw...-raspberry-pi/