Building a stand-alone AVR ATMEGA project sometimes leaves you with no easy to read output from your project. But you can use an Arduino to act as a communications bridge between your embedded project and your PC’s Serial Monitor program!
I’m building an embedded multi-channel thermocouple reader/datalogger, which has a lot of connections and soldering, thus many opportunities for problems!
Since this is an embedded application, and the project itself does not incorporate a USB connection, this left me without any easy communications to my Arduino’s IDE Serial Monitor.
Using an Arduino UNO board, I was able to communicate from my embedded project, through the Arduimo board, then to my PC’s Serial Monitor, which helped me a lot!
For more Detail: Using Arduino to communicate with embedded project using AVR ATMEGA microcontroller