A very cool project: someone’s taken an ATMEGA168 and written a bootloader that emulates the USBasp. This allows it to download code directly over USB – with no on-chip USB peripheral or other USB chip – using a programmer protocol already supported by avrdude. The whole thing fits in 2KB of Flash space.
What this means, is you can make an Arduino-alike, with only one IC (save for the voltage regulator), which still works with the Arduino software for downloading (make a small configuration change). The only disadvantage is that you lose 3 I/O pins during bootloading, and you don’t get a USB-Serial channel back to the PC.
The Metaboard – check it out. Uses the USBaspLoader from Objective Development, who developed the AVR-USB software USB framework.
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