(Tutorial) Boot Loading An ATMega328p For Beginners

If you're just getting started with designing your own printed circuit boards, or PCBs you might be inspired by the simple to use Arduino Nano, its small form factor, and overall aesthetic to new makers and hobbyists. There's a lot to consider when designing a new board, or even using the DIP package of the ATMega328p. In this tutorial, we will show you the easy way to get your ATMega328p boot loaded and ready to use for your project.

What you need

To get started, we need a few tools to make this work quickly. You'll need:

1. An Arduino Board like the Nano or Uno
2. A USB cable for the Arduino Board
3. Some jumper wires
4. You customer ATMega328p PCB or your breadboarded ATMega328p DIP
5. A 10 micro farad (10uF) electrolytic capacitor.
6. The Arduino IDE

Programming the programmer board

The nice thing about Arduino, is they can be used to program other Arduino which is what makes them so appealing for makers. To get started, let's open up the Arduino IDE. After the IDE is open, go to File>Examples>11.ArduinoISP>>ArduinoISP.

You should have this in your editor window:

Now we want to program our programming board by pressing the upload arrow in the Arduino IDE, this being the Arduino board you purchased. Be sure to select the right boot loader for your programming board as some Arduino Nano clones use the old boot loader.

Wiring up to the new microcontroller

This step isn't always clear for many people looking to burn the boot loader onto a new ATMega328p microcontroller. So we will make sure that these steps are as clear as possible. First, if you made your own Arduino clone, we can wire up the new microcontroller easily, for others who followed a different number schematic, we will cover that in the next tutorial. For those who simply made an Arduino clone follow these steps for wiring:

1. Connect D13 on the programming board to D13 on the new board
2. Connect D12 on the programming board to D12 on the new board
3. Connect D11 on the programming board to D11 on the new board
4. Connect D10 on the programming board to Reset (RST) on the new board
5. Connect 5V pin on the programming board to Vin on the new board
6. Connect GND on the programming board to GND on the new board
7. Connect the positive lead of the 10uF capacitor to the reset pin on the programming board, and the negative (shorter) pin to the ground pin.

Ensure that your wiring matches this schematic

The next thing we do is go under Tools>Processor>ATMega328P
This ensures we are putting the newest boot loader on the new microcontroller.

After we do this, we will go under Tools>Programmer>Arduino as ISP
Then we will go under Tools>Burn Bootloader.

Once the boot loader is done being burned onto the new microcontroller, you will see this message in the console on the Arduino IDE.

After you do this, you can plug your new Arduino clone into your computer and program away!

Thanks for joining us on this tutorial! We hope this made it easy to get start