I just upgraded by little Arduino to the ATMega168 – and basically doubled the memory. But, be warned: This is not a hassle-free procedure if you have not some experience with microcontrollers.

I bought a cheap serial programmer – only to figure out that the firmware is outdated and the ATMega168 is not supported. You can update the firmware – but you need another programmer for this *grmp*. So I bought a not-so-cheap mySmartUSB which runs over USB (so there is a chance it will work on the mac, I already found a driver for the USB chipset – stay tuned.)

Today, most programmers come with a 10-pin header (aka Kanda connector), but the Arduino uses the old 6-pin ICSP header. I soldered a converter to solve this. Once I succeeded with the electrical connection, I failed in using avrdude – programming went fine, but I wasn’t able to set the fuse bits. Finally, I have found AvrOspII which worked perfectly on my Windows box. Please read Wolf Paulus’ description to save yourself a lot of time (and broken ATMegas) – he has written a great article about the fuse settings.

If you’re interested in a pre-flashed Arduino, send me an email.

PS: picture CC’ed by opk on flickr.