I read somewhere that I now cannot find was that to make your project permanent you could take off the Microcontroller on certain Arduino boards to put keep them in your project, on your breadboard permanently. Well, your project's circuit board most likely. This can be done with the Uno right? I see that it can be removed from its socket. Is this normally done with the Uno or do I need a mini?
You upload your sketch, pull the chip, make the project on a breadboard or stripboard with your chip, and when you are happy you replace the empty socket on the Arduino with one of the chips above and it is back to new.
This is the tutorial I used to understand how to set the chip up correctly with a crystal, reset switch, etc, on a board:
Anymore, I find that using an AVR Dragon with the ISP programmer is easier and then you don't need to bother with having the bootloader at all, you can use factory blank chips that are a lot cheaper from Digikey:
You still use the Arduino software to make your sketch, you just use the Dragon to send it to the system you built on your board, no bootloader needed.
You don't really have to spend money on another programmer for arduino chips or similar AVR chips. You can use an arduino uno as a programmer:
If you want to use ATMega328 chips, and don't mind the bootloader, I like to use this:
Burn the bootloader onto a blank ATMeag328 chip and then just swap it into the socket of that board to program it and test, then remove it from the board when you are ready to solder it into a stand alone project.
Much cheaper than spending the 20 dollars on a mini, and more fun imo
steven6282:
You don't really have to spend money on another programmer for arduino chips or similar AVR chips.
Sure, but the AVR Dragon gives you some features that the Arduino does not such as high voltage programming which can program "bricked" chips and a hardware debugger that will let you actually set breakpoints and step through your program as it runs in the system. For debugging you have to use their programming suite, so that is an issue for a lot of people I would guess.
If you shop carefully you can find Pro Mini's for $10.00 ea US. I bought 2 328, 5V 16Mhz Pro Mini's at that price on Ebay. For the money they can't be beat. I bought a $9.00 FTDI USB to RS232 breakout board From Electrodragon removed the pins and replaced them with stackable pin headers and had both board programmed and working in less than 20 minutes. When I put pins on the Mini's I also used stackable headers and they work out very well as I can solder them into their intended boards when the code is finished and then the board is finished too.
