While the Arduino family of boards connect to your computer using a USB virtual serial port, the ATmega ones have an actual serial connection on-board.

They also only implement serial sending (so the Arduino receives) so far, although they mention the next step would be to build the other side of the connection.

John Boxall, author of the new book Arduino Workshop, shares a few of the projects from his book on how to get started with the microcontroller. (Click the links to see PDFs of the complete ...