Just wanted to say hi, im new to the forum and pretty excited about what the Arduino can do. I am a mechanical engineer, and at work we have couple of arduion starter kits, which i have the pleasure to experiment with. I just started playing around with it, and things are going good, but i have a simple question.
If i come up with a program/controller and it works great with the arduino, how can i distribute it? I want to be able to have a portable chip, not powered by usb, but by battery or something else, something that you can give to another person. What is the best way to go about going from prototype arduino testing to distributing?
The simplest way is to just use the Arduino but no longer the USB interface. China made Arduinos are around US$ 20.
Otherwise it depends on the hardware setup. You have to solder your own hardware add-ons somewhere, haven't you? Just leave a little space on that board for the AVR chip, and 5 or 6 more small parts.
Search for DIY Arduinos or breadboard Arduinos in this forum or the web. Note there there is literally NOTHING in an Arduino- it is a concept rather than lots of hardware.
The solarbotics Ardweeny http://www.solarbotics.com/products/kardw/ is just under 10$, hard to beat. Even if you go for total DIY, you still have to buy some kind of PCB / perfboard / stripboard, the Atmega Chip, and a handfull of components.
The Ardweeny kit kan be soldered up in less than half an hour.
I bought a couple of them and they work just fine.
Of course they don't have the USB interface so you need something like this http://www.solarbotics.com/products/50512/ to program them, or you could take the Atmega Chip and insert it in an ordinary Arduino and do the programming.
There are other small Arduino clones, the bareboard arduino, the boarduino and lots of others that are just as good as the Ardweeny.
