Context: I live in a rural part of western Canada, a LONG way from electronics stores like Radio Shack (which isn't in Canada any more...). I have one electronics shop an hour from home, which sells parts to industrial users. The shop can order lots of discrete components, but not Arduino boards because their supplier doesn't carry them. I will probably order from a Canadian distributor, even though that usually takes weeks for delivery. That time delay got me in this trouble!
I bought a "starter kit" of a protoboard and some discrete components from Dale Wheat. None of what happened is Dale's fault; he's a good guy in my book. But, by not thinking things through I trashed the chip (ATMega328). My bad. N00b mistake. I admit it. I could have ordered another chip from Dale, but there's that shipping thing again.
I asked and discovered that my local shop could get the chip -- although "bare" with no bootloader (think I'm using the right phrase) so I couldn't just stick it in the board and start back learning to figure this stuff out. Checked the knowledge on this site and bought an AVR ISP mkII...
...which I, in my little dream world, thought would be a device into which I would plug the chip and it would get what it needed and I'd be good to go. I hear chuckles from around the world.
I keep getting in deeper over my head. What I want to do is order the "bare" chip, put in what it needs, and then proceed to build and program a project. It seemed like a good idea at the time to be able to use what I could get locally instead of having to spend endless time waiting on the post office. I'm a complete novice at Arduino, and just trying to speed up the learning process.
Everything I read about this ISP assumes I know more than I do. Can someone please give me a simple idiot-proof set of directions so I can get this working even if I don't understand what I just did? Something like: "get an xxx connector and wire it on the breadboard to pins blah-blah, then plug in the ISP and start Z program and tell it to burn." I think I'm that competent.
Note: if that simple set of instructions is impossible, please tell me. I'll go learn more stuff and buy a board and start over. This has just gotten frustrating and that's no fun.
Thanks for any help!