The Evil Mad Science ISP Shield is a new open source hardware kit that we’re releasing today.

It lets you use your Arduino (or shield-compatible clone, such as the Diavolino) as an AVR ISP programmer, for example to burn bootloaders onto “raw” AVR chips, directly within the Arduino programming environment, either in the provided ZIF socket or on an external target board.

You can read more about this process here.

The circuit is designed to be compatible with the “Arduino as ISP” option in recent versions of the Arduino IDE. It is based on a number of prior hardware implementations, most closely the version by Andre Knoerig at Fritzing.

Complete documentation, including assembly instructions, design files, and basic usage information is available on the Evil Mad Science Wiki.