The Arduino Mega is a larger, more powerful microcontroller board based on the ATmega1280. It's perfect for anyone looking for more room for code or to be able to control a lot more LEDs, sensors, servos, or motors..
Four Times the Fun with the Arduino Mega!
Arduino is an open source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller and an open source development environment. It is commonly used by artists, designers, hobbyists, students, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from sensors such as temperature, light, proximity, force, contact, pressure, and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators.
The Arduino Mega is based on the ATMega1280 microcontroller and it has four times the amount of flash memory, SRAM and EEPROM as its Duemilanove counterpart:
- 128 KB of flash memory (of which 4 KB is used for the bootloader)
- 8 KB of SRAM
- 4 KB of EEPROM
The Arduino Mega is compatible with most shields designed for the Duemilanove or Diecimila. Digital pins 0 to 13 (and the adjacent AREF and GND pins), analog inputs 0 to 5, the power header, and ICSP header are all in equivalent locations.
Features:
- 54 digital input/output pins (of which 14 can be used as PWM outputs)
- 16 analog inputs
- 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports)
- 16 MHz crystal oscillator
- USB connection
- power jack
- ICSP header
The Arduino Mega has a number of facilities for communicating with a computer, another Arduino, or other microcontrollers. The ATMega1280 provides four hardware UARTs for TTL (5V) serial communication. An FTDI FT232RL on the board channels one of these over USB and the FTDI drivers (included with the software) providing a virtual COM port to software on the computer.
The software includes a serial monitor which allows simple textual data to be sent to and from the Arduino board.
