I have done a small Arduino project on a breadboard. I want to enclose it in a project box to make it permanent but I do not want to sacrifice my Arduino.
I am thinking to use a bare ATmega328 like the Arduino's with all the supporting circuitry.
What am I going to need? I have a universal programmer from ebay, similar to the one Dave reviewed some time ago. Will this do, or do I need an Atmel specific programmer?
What other materials am I going to need, eg voltage regulators, capacitors, crystal?
This is what I did in the first try and it worked:
Step 1: Bare MCU (Needs two 22pf, one 16Mhz crystal, one LED, one 300 ohm-1K resistor for the LED)
1. Load the blink program to the (from the examples) MCU
2. Follow the Arduino site's breadboarding the ATMEGA328 (skip the RS232 breakout for now) but make sure you connect an LED to digital line 13
3. Optionally, connect a tac-switch to the RST pin (pin1) with a pull up resister.
4. Power up and see if your MCU on the breadboard is blinking the LED. If so, you have an MCU with bare circuitry that you can transfer to PCB.
Step 2: Optional (unless you need to download program direct)
1. First modify the Arduino Site's serial example to write something (of your choice) to serial and make sure you can see it.
2. Follow the Arduino site's breadboard on using an Arduino UNO's serial connectivity alone -- note that that is the one where you must remove the MCU from the socket. The UNO is just a "serial adaptor" to your bare MCU.
3. Test.
4. Now decide if you can use that to load programs to your bare MCU.
Step 3: Decide if you want to get an RS323 breakout or use #2, decide if you want a reset button or not (pull up resistor and tac-switch)
That is how I made a "home made" Arduino board.