I am in the middle of a project in which I will be embedding an almost exact Arduino clone. This project will be using an ATMega382P-AU in a TQFP package for the microcontroller, and an FT232RL for serial communications, wired in the exact same way as the Arduino Duemilanove. The only differences in the two schematics are that mine has the USB V+ pin not connected, as I plan to only use an external power supply, and AREF is tied to +5V. The ATMega382 will be coming straight from Digikey, with no bootloader.
There are a few bootloaders to chose from, and I don't want to permanently mess up my chip after I solder it in (It is SMD). My questions are:
1: Does the latest version of the Arduino IDE have the Duemilanove bootloader(with the faster timeout), and would it work correctly in my application?
2: Does the latest version of the Arduino IDE have the Optiboot bootloader, and would it work correctly in my application (without the notorious "flash amnessia")?
3: Are there any better bootloaders than these that would work correctly in my application?
Also, I saw in the notes for ArduinoISP that
Windows users should consider WinAVR's avrdude instead of the avrdude included with Arduino software.
Should I take this into consideration, because I am running Windows Vista 32-bit.
Thanks.