David Reyes, aka Tuxbrain, one of the Arduino distributors in Spain, has just brought to life one of the coolest hacks I have seen for some time. He managed to reflash Arduino Uno from a Ben NanoNote. He has implemented a text-based IDE that can reflash the boards directly from the NanoNote without using external power. If you want to have a device to reprogram your ATmega processors without having to bring your computer around, this can be a great solution. Just remember, this is an advanced hack, you should be familiar to the use of CLI (Command Line Interface), but David has promised taking a look at Qt-creator and put together a small text editor with uploading capabilities. Stay tuned at Tuxbrain’s development website!

(c) 2011 Picture courtesy of Tuxbrain

On Tuxbrain, thanks to the Qi-Hardware , AVRFreaks communities and to the little UBB board, we have successfully flash an Arduino board from Ben NanoNote without need of external power, directly connecting a cable from the NanoNote 8:10 bay to the ICSP header on Arduino, also without need of bootloader in the Atmega328 chip, in fact NanoNote can flash the bootloaders :), and in theory Nanonote can flash whatever  avrdude compatible chip without need of any board (untested yet). Making the little Ben the first AVR microcontroller programmer in the world able to edit the source code, building it, listen music or play Supertux at same time, in same device, not bad for only 99€ ;)