Any leave-behind board for programmed processor?

Again, thank you all for you wonderful suggestions. It takes a while for me to investigate them and compare/understand the stuff, but do keep them coming.

Also a note regarding that guy on kickstarter: Since that first post, I've stumebled over his name a few times and - actually - it is clear he is very much a contributor to our little Arduino society and elsewhere, see eg: http://www.instructables.com/member/randofo/ We should probably not judge him from the unfortunate comments on that kickstarter page. Among his many(!) contributions on Instructables, there are instructions for the very "Arduino Project Board": http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Project-Board/?ALLSTEPS

:-)

Again, thank you all for you wonderful suggestions. It takes a while for me to investigate them and compare/understand the stuff, but do keep them coming.

Also a note regarding that guy on kickstarter: Since that first post, I've stumebled over his name a few times and - actually - it is clear he is very much a contributor to our little Arduino society and elsewhere, see eg: http://www.instructables.com/member/randofo/ We should probably not judge him from the unfortunate comments on that kickstarter page. Among his many(!) contributions on Instructables, there are instructions for the very "Arduino Project Board": http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Project-Board/?ALLSTEPS

:-)

after following and reading this thread over a period of days now, I feel that you should perhaps consider (for the future) as a goal, moving Away from Arduino per se as, A) a form factor, and B) an IDE/Abstraction layer, and take what you`re learning to Progress beyond this, and into freeform builds and Code.

I started with arduino myself, and soon (quite quickly in fact) it became Not Enough.

my 1`st step was to freeform build boards to do jobs that I wanted doing, but I was still stuck with my modified arduino board that I put a ZIF socket on to program the chips.

so I moved to FTDI serial programmed, and That worked too!

then I realised that there was No need at all for any arduino Bootloader and that code could be put directly on the chip itself!

and discovered Other chips out there just as easy to use with more Pins that aren`t Arduino.

the fact that you`re asking these sorts of questions to begin with, says to me at least that you should consider exploring alternatives, and not be Locked into ideas of Formfactor for the female SIL headers, or to the FTDI chip, or 8u2 (or whatever the new version is for the Uno?).

it`s Seriously NOT set in stone that all Must be this way or else!...

Experiment and Express yourself!

If you decide to branch out but want to stay with the Atmega chips, check out http://www.avrfreaks.net/

Good point about other chips - for small projects the MSP430 Launchpad from TI is super inexpensive - the board with everything you need to get started is $4.30 (and free shipping in N America) and it's about 50 cents for the chip, I think. https://estore.ti.com/Product3.aspx?ProductId=2031

But I find it's a lot harder to program than the Arduino is. Maybe after spending much more time with it, it will make sense

And maybe it's because the sample is set up to be super energy efficient by doing everything with interrupts.