After your first few experiments with an Arduino, you might stumble across a great idea you want to implement as a permanent device, gift to a loved one, or to share with the world. After working out the circuit around an Arduino, some people believe that they have to give away their entire Arduino, complete with all the connecting wires and birds-nest mess that goes along with it. That, good sirs and madames, is nonsense.

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If you want to take your device to the next level, you'll need to program a bare AVR chip to run the code you've developed. If you want to build around the ATMega328 chip (the same chip that's inside the Arduino), you can even program the bare chip with the same code as the Arduino sketch. A great sketch has been written by an Arduino user that lets you turn your Arduino into an AVR programmer. It's great if you just need to program one chip and be done with it, but sometimes you want to develop code while a chip is socketed on a board, to program surface mount components, or to program lots of chips in a short amount of time. Using the shield I developed, you can use the ZIF socket to quickly swap out chips to be programmed (it supports 3 device families), or use the Atmel standard ICSP protocol to program chips that are already in-circuit with the ICSP header.

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This shield also has headers for socketing crystals and capacitors while programming chips, so that you can burn the chip's fuses to use an external ocsillator, and still program the chip; great for flashing Arduino bootloaders! For tutorials on how to program AVR chips using this board, please visit :
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/200
http://code.google.com/p/mega-isp/wiki/AvrispArduino

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The board is currently being sold at NYCResistor in the vending machine!

Complete BOM, Prices are total, SFE = Sparkfun, DK = Digikey:

You can grab the schematic and Eagle brd files here and from the images on the right:
http://www.soniktech.com/senpai/senpaibrd.sch
http://www.soniktech.com/senpai/senpaibrd.brd

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