Arduino Mega2560 Rev3 *RETAIL*

The Arduino Mega 2560 is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega2560. It has 54 digital input/output pins (of which 14 can be used as PWM outputs), 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started. The Mega is compatible with most shields designed for the Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila.

Summary

Power

The Arduino Mega can be powered via the USB connection or with an external power supply. The power source is selected automatically.

External (non-USB) power can come either from an AC-to-DC adapter (wall-wart) or battery. The adapter can be connected by plugging a 2.1mm center-positive plug into the board's power jack. Leads from a battery can be inserted in the Gnd and Vin pin headers of the POWER connector.

The board can operate on an external supply of 6 to 20 volts. If supplied with less than 7V, however, the 5V pin may supply less than five volts and the board may be unstable. If using more than 12V, the voltage regulator may overheat and damage the board. The recommended range is 7 to 12 volts.

The Mega2560 differs from all preceding boards in that it does not use the FTDI USB-to-serial driver chip. Instead, it features the ATmega16U2 programmed as a USB-to-serial converter.

Memory

The ATmega2560 has 256 KB of flash memory for storing code (of which 8 KB is used for the bootloader), 8 KB of SRAM and 4 KB of EEPROM (which can be read and written with the EEPROM library).

Input and Output

Each of the 54 digital pins on the Mega can be used as an input or output, using pinMode(), digitalWrite(), and digitalRead() functions. They operate at 5 volts. Each pin can provide or receive a maximum of 40 mA and has an internal pull-up resistor (disconnected by default) of 20-50 kOhms.

The Mega2560 has 16 analog inputs, each of which provide 10 bits of resolution (i.e. 1024 different values). By default they measure from ground to 5 volts, though is it possible to change the upper end of their range using the AREF pin and analogReference() function.

Communication

The Arduino Mega2560 has a number of facilities for communicating with a computer, another Arduino, or other microcontrollers. The ATmega2560 provides four hardware UARTs for TTL (5V) serial communication. An ATmega16U2 (ATmega 8U2 on the revision 1 and revision 2 boards) on the board channels one of these over USB and provides a virtual com port to software on the computer (Windows machines will need a .inf file, but OSX and Linux machines will recognize the board as a COM port automatically. The Arduino software includes a serial monitor which allows simple textual data to be sent to and from the board. The RX and TX LEDs on the board will flash when data is being transmitted via the ATmega8U2/ATmega16U2 chip and USB connection to the computer (but not for serial communication on pins 0 and 1).

A SoftwareSerial library allows for serial communication on any of the Mega2560's digital pins.

The ATmega2560 also supports TWI and SPI communication. The Arduino software includes a Wire library to simplify use of the TWI bus.

Programming

The Arduino Mega can be programmed with the Arduino software.

The ATmega2560 on the Arduino Mega comes preburned with a bootloader that allows you to upload new code to it without the use of an external hardware programmer. It communicates using the original STK500 protocol.

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