Actually, you don't need an Arduino board to use the Arduino IDE to
program an Arduino nor do you you need the USB interface to the Arduino
board to program an Arduino.
For example, you can have a simple Atmega328 circuit with a six or ten
pin in circuit programming connection (ISP) connected to a programmer, a
USBtiny for example, the programmer in turn is plugged into your
computer usb port. You select an appropriate board from the list in the
Arduino IDE and select a programmer from the programmer list and from
the File menu select "Upload using programmer" and your Arduino like
clone will get programmed using the programmer. The advantage of this is
that you do not need a bootloader and will have that bit of program
space for your own use. You will note that many Arduino boards have a
six pin ISP connector on them already.
So, what board do you select from the drop down? Depends on how you
built your circuit, if you used an Atmega328P with a 16MHz external
crystal, you could select something like the Duemilanove w/Atmega328.
But, the real fun begins when your circuit isn't quite the same as any
of the listed boards because you can create your own board definition
and include it in the boards.txt file. For example, an atmega328 using
an external 20MHz or 10MHz crystal. But wait, it gets better, you can
create board defintions for Arduino's using other atmel chips like the
attiny85 and attiny2313 and create your program using the same Arduino
IDE and many of the same libraries and existing sketches and program
same through that same IDE. What you do loose however is the serial port
connection which is useful for debugging or whatever BUT you can include
serial support in your sketch and still have that feature.
Chris is right, the basic Arduino connected through your basic USB cable
is the simplest why to get started.
cheers, Graham ve3gtc
On 14-02-13 04:11 PM, Chris Albertson wrote:
You can buy the chip already on the PCB with supporting circuitry for
less then the price of the chip alone. No need to go with a bare
chip. I think the reason is that the tiny SMT package chips sell in
the millions and only a hob best would use the larger DIP through hole
package. Look at eBay #221326355393 as an example. The 3>71 price
includes shipping. The advantage is __Programming__. When you are
working on something like this you tend to want to re-program the
chips ten times an hour and it s VERY convenient to be able to leave
it plugged into the USB port on your computer. Also for debugger a
continuous stream of data on your computer screen, maybe captured to a
file, gives yo insight to the internals.
That is the advantage of development with the Arduino vs. a bare chip,
you don't have to pull the chip to re-program it. Yousimply change a
line of code using a text editor and click the "load" icon and a few
seconds later you are running again. It is a very fast development
cycle.
You don't save either cost or space by using a large DIP chip the SMD
chip soldered to a PCB is about the same cost and size but also comes
with the pull up resisters, voltage regulater, standard 6-pin FTDI
interface and so on.
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