Has anyone tried building one of these Metaboard – Metalab Wiki?
Looks like a really cost effective testing platform for arduino if you can live without serial feedback to the PC?
Based on USBaspLoader which bypasses the need for a 232 chip (I think..)
Yep I've built two - although I didn't use their .brd files - I couldn't get the very fine lines to work well with the toner transfer method.
It works well for projects as you describe, that don't need to be able to communicate using serial.
Be warned that (as of November 2008) the driver they supply is NOT compatible with ladyada's USBtinyISP - you CANNOT have both installed at the same time. So to get the bootloader on the metaboard, I had to install the driver supplied with the tinyISP, install the bootloader, uninstall the driver, install the driver associated with the metaboard. The two drivers are the same, but different versions - I can't remember the name off the top of my head. This might have been fixed by now.
We started talking about the metaboards here:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1207039713