Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing).
See the official ”Arduino”-website for details[1].
My aim here is to document some solutions of details I found during my experiments. Please be aware that my Arduino experiments have been in 2006, so some information may be outdated.
The first difficulty when building your first microcontroller board is to burn a bootloader to the ATMEGA 8 or ATMEGA 168. Especially with the ATMEGA 168 it may cause a few problems burning the first bootloader.
I want to give a short overview to different ISP programmers I tested here:
Bootloader - a comparison of different programmers
The original Arduino is nothing but an ATmega168 and a few extra components to connect to the PC.