ATmega8 with Diecimilia board

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Frequently-Asked Questions
1

Hello,

I'm the happy owner of a deicimilia Arduino board; it's making a great introduction into microcontroller programming for me.

A friend of mine burned me a bunch of ATMega8 chips with the Arduino bootloader. I intended to use them as the "real" target of my projects, using the board as my development environment and keeping only the bare minimum needed for my project to keep the costs down (hard to justify the ~50$ in stuff to hack a toy.. :wink: )

I have the cristals and whatnot that's need to used them, but I was wondering: is it safe (or even possible at all) to use these chips in place of the atmega168 that's already in my Arduino board?

2

It's "safe", electrically speaking. I would think that it should work OK if you configure the arduino environment for a "NG or older with ATmega8" board rather than a "deicimila"; a lot of the configuration that happens there is more rom monitor and binary cpu compatibility, rather than "board" compatibility. For instance, pre-diecimila ATmega168 cpus work fine in the "Freeduino" Diecimila clones.