[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by karlcswanson

The Arduino is has a bootloader that emulates an STK500, and a standard 6 pin ISP header. The "Arduino Language" is just some functions that they include to make it easier to program, you can add in standard avr code, or not use the arduino stuff at all. I like the arduino because it is pretty good for prototyping things, I recently purchased a STK500 and dragonfly bundle from digikey and i still use the arduino more.

That solution sounds a bit expensive. If the Arduino's source code is open source might as well turn any of the Avrs that it supports into a a boot loadable device because essentially that is what you are paying for.

Well there are many reasons. Me an everyone I know that uses them wishes they could. It is a development board. which means it is used to develop there have been more then a few project where we have needed to just mount it to a robot really quick so we can have a PWM pulse gen on the bot. But it was harder to mount this. Now don't just go and say create a PCB because we needed the serial port for the USART, etc. It isn't something that is permanent. But it certainly would have helped.

That really wouldn't be the way I would do it though. Namely because it's $80.00 which is cheap for what it does but not cheap enough that Im willing to stick it on a robot. The Dragon has no use on a robot because of it's limited prototyping area.