Program an Atmega328 on a breadboard.
The Arduinos are great but sometimes your own circuits needs something different and you only want the atmega without the arduino board.
First follow this nice guide Building an Arduino on a breadboard.
Then to program the chip you need an FTDI USB interface, I own the older model from dfrobot, the only thing you have to know is:
- FTDI TX to atmega pin 3
- FTDI TX to atmega pin 2
- GND and +5v to your breadboard
Then start the arduino interface on you computer, choose the board Arduino Duemilanove or Nano w/ atmega328.
Put a wire between atmega pin 1 and GND (to RESET), hit the upload button on your computer then when you see “Binary sketch size: 3788 bytes (of a 30720 byte maximum)” release the wire, you’re done.
Note that you need an Atmega with an arduino boot loader, you can buy them everywhere preloaded or burn the bootloader yourself.
