Arduino Mega 2560 R2

Arduino Mega - what is that?

NOTE! This is Arduino Mega 2560 version R2, we are offering also newer version - Arduino Mega 2560 R3.

Arduino Mega 2560 is a developer board based on ATmega2560 microcontroller.

Arduino Mega 2560 is compatible with Arduino Duemilanove/UNO footprint. It means, the shields designed for Duemilanove will also fit to Mega board. However, there are some differences between functions of particular pins, thus not every shield can be used with Arduino Mega. One could say, Arduino Mega is Arduino UNO's older brother - bigger memory, more input/output pins, so it's dedicated to more advanced applications than UNO.

Totally it has 54 digital inputs/outputs (including 14 capable of PWM operation), 16 analog inputs, 4 serial ports (UART), SPI and I2C interfaces. Available memory is 256 KB of flash, 8 KB RAM and 4 KB EEPROM. The processor works with frequency of 16 MHz.

This model is also equipped with a new USB module (so as Arduino UNO) based on ATmega8U2 chip (instead of FTDI chip used in previous models).

What it means for the user? Additional 3.3V voltage regulator provides 150 mA of overall maximum output current (compare it to 50 mA offered by previous versions). What's more, ATmega8U2 has its own firmware, which can be reprogrammed when necessary. Thanks to this, Arduino can appear as different type of hardware (mass storage device, keyboard or another HID device) when connected to PC.

Arduino Mega 2560 boards sold by us are original. Buying it, you're supporting the Arduino team (a part of the revenue is committed for further Arduino development).

The board is simple to use, in accordance to Arduino project's philosophy - connect it to PC with USB cable and you are able to begin programming in a free development environment, available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems (in every of them it requires Java to work). Advanced users can use another IDE environments (toolchain avr-gcc).

Thanks to pre-loaded bootloader, you don't need additional programmer. Your program is loaded through USB.