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Please bear with me, I'm new to Arduinos/uCs..

So an ATMEGA uC needs an external oscillator to run? Is it to provide the clock signal or for something else? If so, why doesn't it have its own clock signal generator? Wouldn't it always need one to run at all?

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The standard bootloader needs a resonator or crystal to run the oscillator. You can also program a bootloader which uses the internal oscillator in the Arduino IDE, in that case no resonator or crystal is used, like I did with the attiny.

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