Also, with Arduino you can easily and cheaply buy more ATmega328 DIPs and put them on protoboard for an embedded project.
I built a little server rack temperature monitor (which collects data from a couple sensors and provides a simple REST service over ethernet) that way, all you need to run the ATmega328 by itself is about 50 cents worth of components.
I built a little server rack temperature monitor (which collects data from a couple sensors and provides a simple REST service over ethernet) that way, all you need to run the ATmega328 by itself is about 50 cents worth of components.