Kathy Yang writes, “We may often encounter such situation as bootloader falls off when using Arduino, this thing can freak us out especially when we got no bootloader tools on hand. So what shall we do? Here we’ll introduce a way on how to burn c via Arduino, which is rather practical in cases when without bootloader burning tools and no extra Arduinos.”
Nice for a beginner. How about FTDI bit banging, ATTiny85 (think Littlewire) as a USB programmer, or something like programming an FPGA with the uC you have on hand as an XVF player?
Over the air or Ethernet programming is interesting as well. Check out the collection of bootloaders from Dean Camera’s LUFA project that can be network coupled via USB. Moteino works with RFM69 radios to acheive the same effect.
I would be interested in seeing more on Codebender.cc’s bootloader if anyone recalls the project.
Give me a parallel port, telephone wire, scrounged components for an 80386 system, and we can talk about industrial overkill for a programmer. Need more esoteric ways to fry chips over here. “Can I get a side of magic smoke to go with that and a large LN2?”
The documentation for the ArduinoISP sketch gives a pretty good rundown of what one can do with it as well, including the UNO, Duemilanove, Diecimila, NG or older, or just an AVR on a breadboard. Wiring diagrams are included.