Is it possible to take a bare ATmega328 chip, and with an Arduino as ISP, burn a sketch directly to the chip (e.g. not needing a bootloader), or is the bootloader required to run Arduino sketches? I want to embed the ATmega328 into a different device, and do not want the overhead of the entire Arduino board.
I have looked at https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoToBreadboard and https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoISP, and want to do the "minimal circuit" approach (as my application does not require 16MHz).
The tutorial described has steps to first burn a bootloader, then remove the chip from the Arduino, and then install the sketch. Ideally, I would like to skip the bootloader and removing the chip from my Arduino. Ideally, I would like to do it all from Arduino Studio (not AVRDUDE CLI).
I don't mind "dedicating" my Arduino to this (as I assume it's just burning the ArduinoISP sketch whenever I want to burn to a new ATMega328).
Thanks