Writing small sketches and playing around with Arduino is funny, but I was curious about reducing the component numbers, the board size and skipping the bootloader to recover those precious 0.5 KB.

It turned out it’s quite simple, even if there are contradictory informations scattered around the net.

Armed with the following board definition (which works flawlessly with versions 1.0 and 1.0.1 of the IDE), an Arduino Uno, a breadboard, a brand new ATmega328p, a bunch of wires, a crystal, some capacitors, an LED and a couple of resistors I was able to upload a sketch without any bootloader and see it working :)

A better name could be “ATmega328p (16 MHz, w/o bootloader)”, but for someone like me who’s still wet behind the ears, “Arduino Uno (w/o bootloader)” seems better :)

Not bad, not bad at all… and, more importantly, funny :)