Programming an ATmega328P by holding it on an Uno's I was looking at this Uno clone, the Nanino and then happened to read this article on "Manhattan style" circuit design. Anyway, that got me thinking...

If I borrowed someone's Arduino Uno, could I hold a blank ATmega328P on top of the identical chip on that Uno and load a bootloader onto the board's chip as well as my chip? The desired result would be to give my blank ATmega328P a bootloader.
It's easy enough to use a Uno to program a bootloader onto another chip. I describe this process here.

The idea of holding one chip on top of another is likely to fail for various reasons. Both chips will try to respond to the programming attempt at slightly different times, probably making them both fail to be programmed.

See my post about making a breadboard Arduino. It only takes a few wires to program the target chip.



However this isn't just "paralleling the pins" - it is using one chip to program another, in the way it is designed to do.