Putting arduino bootloader on atmega 168 with avrisp?

[Myrmidon]

Hello all.

Seeing as the arduino is an atmega168, i was wondering if you could just burn the bootloader and/or sketches with an avrisp straight to an atmega168 and it's similar pin out brothers, 48,88,328 etc?

Or could you just remove the atmega from the arduino and do it that way?

I couldn't find any definitive answers as i'm not entirely sure what the bootloader is/does.



EDIT: I'v just seen that you can use the ISCP header to program the avr directly, so in essence i assume you can use it to program similar pin out chips, atmega 48,88 etc?

[westfw]

Yes, to both questions. The arduino libraries do not support the 48 or 88, but sketches should run OK if they stay away from HW-level incompatibilities. The bootloader allows programming the AVR via the UART (and thus the USB->ASYNC interface in the FTDI), but it's not used as any sort of run-time library, so sketches should run fine without it.

[Myrmidon]

Thanx for clearing that up.