I have considered purchasing some ATMega chips as to create simple realizations of projects without sacrificing a dev board (i.e. Arduino)
Now I understand the bootloader is required to read from a usb-to-serial device. The AVR ISP (or equivalent) burns the bootloader, then people often either use a usb-to-serial or the Arduino itself to program the chip.
What on earth does the AVR ISP actually do? If it can burn a bootloader (is it stored within, a generic one for all the AVRs it supports?) why can it not also program the device (as people seem to never instruct, even if that makes it simple)
Why does the ISP also allow you to connect to a computer via USB, for power? for custom boot loaders? Can it even "program" a compiled program in to flash via something such as avr-gcc (assuming the arduino IDE does things that required the bootloader)
I just cannot wrap heads or tails around what is required. I am aiming for a "program the new chip, plug it in to socket, and go" kind of approach without multiple burns or programming.
Best Answer
You can fully program an ATMega with the AVR ISP.
I build a MIDIpal at the beginning of this year. The supplied ATMega chip hadn't been pre-programmed. So after soldering up the board (much easier than I expected. SMT is nothing to fear), I plugged in my TinyISP and downloaded the binary code to it. Now my MIDIpal works as advertised.
I'm not familiar with the bootloader portion, but imagine that it must have been included in the firmware provided by Mutable.