On Dec 21, 2007 11:50 AM, Nathan Stien <<a href="mailto:nathanism@gmail.com">nathanism@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">On Dec 21, 2007 11:39 AM, Matthew Nuzum <<a href="mailto:newz@bearfruit.org">newz@bearfruit.org</a>> wrote:<br>> I was thinking about buying an atmega168 and experimenting with arduino
<br>> stuff. I went to ebay and searched for atmega and I see a bunch of nearly<br>> identical items for sale.<br><br></div></div>Seems to me like you could use them for, well, whatever you want. I<br>would say robots!
<br><br>I must be misunderstanding your question. You know what you could use<br>a PIC or any other embedded processor for; I would say this should be<br>pretty much the same use case -- a nice way to prototype or build a
<br>hobby project without having to solder a surface mount chip.<br></blockquote></div><br>I'm under the impression that these are for a special purpose. There's only about 6pins brought out to signal pads. One of them looked kind of like a smart card. Maybe these are for hacking systems that use smart card based authentication? If so, I didn't think there'd be such a market for them that you'd find them so cheap on ebay.
<br><br>No biggie. <br><br>I bought an arduino, so am looking forward to playing with it next week. I'm tired of messing with eeprom burners, so a system with a bootloader that you can just download code to sounds awesome. The atmega's seem to be well supported under Linux, unlike the PICs. I've still got three USB 18F2455 boards (SOT package) that I built but haven't downloaded a single line of code to.
<br><br>-- <br>Matthew Nuzum<br>newz2000 on freenode