"So as a baseline I need a programmer to be connected to a PC and from the programmer a gadget to contact the necessary pins to program the processor."
Or a standalone programmer, where the file to be loaded is coming from SD card (like mine) or from other media.
Programmed ATmega328P can be purchased from places like digikey.com. I don't know what quantity you need to order to make that economically viable vs just press & hold the programming adapter above. I did 20 cards a couple weekends ago, it is not hard.
Hi CrossRoads,
A very big good news and a slightly less good one:
Good news: a new family member of the Arduino break-out boards was born, I received my first DIYino board just recently and it works!!! (I'm no excited I could jump up and down from joy, it's really a satisfying feeling to hold an own design in the hand and know that it works as expected!) For the first few samples I had a mix of boards with Atmegas with and wo/bootloader.
Hick-up: as I expected from experience, burning the bootloader did not work right away using an Arduino Nano as an AVR ISP programmer. Well, this was about the only thing I did not had the chance to try out up-front. I still do no know if the problem is on the sending side (ISP) or on the receiving one (new DIYino wo/bootloader) but I suspect the former, since even if I do not hook up the DIYino, I get exacly the same message from the IDE:
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding
avrdude: stk500_getsync() attempt 1 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x03
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding
avrdude: stk500_getsync() attempt 2 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x03
...
So far I do not have a clue how I'm going to approach this problem, but I'm in a hurry since some guys are waiting for boards. I've seen that some people prefer to write own commands to burn the bootloader with commands like (just an example I could grap):
avrdude -c avrispmkII -p m8 -P usb:xx -v > "C:\output.txt" 2>&1
I'm not sure what I need to send these commands to my DIYino board. Do I need a special hardware? I guess the Arduino IDE does not support this level.
Another topic:
if I want my break-out board to be called an Arduino break-out board, do I need to put it under a certain licence? Where can I get it?