Having just recently gotten into Electronics and the Arduino I sort of felt like I jumped the gun and wanted to learn some of the basics and create my own stripped down Atmega circuit. I ordered up an AVR ISP mkii, a ZIF socket, a couple of Atmega168's (328's happened to be out of stock) and some other odds and ends needed to get the job done. My end goal was to get a standalone Atmega168 running code I had written and compiled in the Arduino IDE.
Everything went very smooth until I jumped the gun setting the Fuse Bits on one of the 168's and I bricked it. Luckily after a few hours of reading an testing I was able to bring it back to life. Once I put that behind me, I coded up a small "blink" applet in the Arduino IDE and uploaded it to my Arduino. As expected it worked fine so I uploaded the HEX created by the IDE to my standalone Atmega168 using AVR Studio and voila! I'm pretty happy to know that I can easily and cheaply throw a circuit like this together now! I know it's trivial stuff to you veterans but I'm thrilled haha I'm going to move it all to a PCB on the weekend so I'll have a little programming board to burn chips whenever I please
Yes, that is a great learning journey. As one masters these phases of starting with a blank AVR chip and ending up with either a standalone dedicated device or another device that can use with the Arduino IDE.
It's kind of liberating to throw off the Arduino board as 'training wheels' and building from scratch components. The next step might be to master using AVRDUDE directly, either through it's command line or via a make file or even with a standalone GUI wrapper that drives AVRDUDE. Lots of hints and ideas in the Arduino playground section.
I think it's been three or four weeks since I first opened my Arduino package in the mail and I've been hooked ever since. I can't stop messing with this stuff lol
Nice...Surely I'll be walking that path too some day. But for now I'll have to use my Arduino board as a programmer and buy the chips with a bootloader.
Anyway have you considered making a step by step tutorial?
