Limited knowledge here. Patience please. I have an Arduino board and want to program an Atmel168 chip as a standalone that runs several motors. Can I simply buy the chip on Ebay, program it on the board, and solder it to a pcb along with whatever else is necessary?
The Arduino environment is predicated on having an ATmega that has the bootloader burned on it. What you said will work, with the restriction that you must buy an ATmega with the bootloader preloaded (several places offer such) or you must burn the bootloader yourself.
-j
And once you have your Atmel programed with your sketch you will probably want one of these boards to save some time with hand wiring a prototype.
http://www.nkcelectronics.com/arduino-runtime-board-rev-b.html
I have several of them and they work great.
KG2
This has already been covered here - http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1226327718