swapping out arduino chips

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

I've been thinking. If you want a lot of different projects all at the same time, you're going to need a lot of arduinos. So, rather than buying up a bunch of duemilanoves, it may be better to just buy a bunch of atmega 328 chips, program them with one board, and just swap them out into a breadboard when I need them.

That raises the problem of components for the breadboard version of arduino. I like compactness and I'd rather not have a bunch of components on the board if I could combine them. I've seen people that have soldered all of the necessary components directly to a chip, which I love the idea of. However, will there be any problems when I insert the chip into the main arduino board?

To clarify, I want to know if there's anything wrong with putting something along the lines of this:

http://www.geocities.jp/arduino_diecimila/obaka/project-2/index_en.html

into the arduino board where the normal chip goes, just to program it and then remove the chip for the project.

2

You can not put anything like that back in the Arduino board for programming.

The 'Arduino on a chip' has its own 16 Mhz resonator and reset switch so it would not work in the Arduino board.

You would need something like this:
http://www.solarbotics.com/products/50512/

to upload a new progam to it.

I bought one of them and a bunch of these:
http://www.solarbotics.com/products/kardw/

For the doing what you are after.

3

Great, thanks. That's exactly what I was wondering.

4

Make sure get the USB mini cable ;). I use the same ftdi module. Also make sure it's got the bootloader already on the chip.