This is a minimal circuit that an Arduino Uno can operate on, tested and worked on breadboards.
The test subject contains a minimal system that supports the microcontroller ATMEGA328P-PU, which is an ATMEGA328 chip in DIP-28 form, with 16MHz crystal oscillator and pair of 22pF capacitor for the clock source, simple pull-up reset circuit with 10K ohm resistor and push button, 0.1uF (100nF) decoupling capacitors on VCC and AREF pins to GND.
To make the minimal Arduino Uno circuit to be able to communicate with my PC, I use the famous CH340 USB serial bridge chip, and added a USB connectivity as shown in the circuit diagram below.
Minimal circuit to use ATMEGA328 with Arduino
To test whether this setup works with Arduino, I connect the USB port to PC with an USB cable. As for the programming software, I used Pictoblox, a Scratch programming software by STEMpedia for easy coding, selected board as Arduino Uno, connect the COM Serial number (reaching this stage means the CH340 is detectable by the PC, which is a good thing).
I created a LED Blink code and attempt to upload the program into the ATMEGA328 chip.
It is a success! I can upload the code into the ATMEGA328 chip in this way, therefore I can confirm that the circuit is working, with the success result using Pictoblox, this should also works with Arduino IDE and other platforms.
Thank you for reading this and hope you have good luck trying this out!
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