I now have the Simon game working without an Arduino board! I wanted to be able to make several running projects without having to buy a board for each one, so I followed this guide: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone

In the photo above, the large circuit board is performing all the functions that the Arduino used to, including providing regulated power, a clock, a status LED, and connections for the I/O pins of the ATMega chip. The ATMega standalone chip with the Arduino bootloader preloaded can be purchased from sites such as sparkfun, or you can burn your own bootloader.

I can now program the chip in the Arduino then use it in an independent project. Now I just need to clear off these breadboards for my next project by soldiering it all on a PCB!

This project is still a work in progress. Functionally, it is complete, but I want to learn some soldiering skills by making it permanent on a PCB.

The idea for this project was to learn the basics of input and output with Arduino. This is my first real project, and I am happy with how it turned out. Before embarking on this project, I made sure not to google anything related to Arduino and Simon lest my mind become clouded with other’s ideas. I wanted to build this from the ground up, using my own inputs, outputs, and logic along the way.

The code and schematic can be found here:

https://github.com/jerwil/Simon_Breadboard