Arduino Mega 2650

Arduino Boards have revitalized the automation industry with their easy-to-use platform where everyone with little or no technical background can get started with learning some basic skills to program and run the board. Arduino Mega 2560 is a Microcontroller board based on Atmega2560. It comes with more memory space and I/O pins as compared to other boards available in the market.

• There are 54 digital I/O pins and 16 analog pins incorporated on the board that make this device unique and stand out from others.

• Out of 54 digital I/O, 15 are used for PWM (pulse width modulation).

• A crystal oscillator of 16MHz frequency is added on the board.

• This board comes with USB cable port that is used to connect and transfer code from computer to the board.

• DC power jack is coupled with the board that is used to power the board. Some version of the Arduino board lacks this feature like Arduino Pro Mini doesn’t come with DC power jack.

• ICSP header is a remarkable addition to Arduino Mega which is used for programming the Arduino and uploading the code from the computer.

• This board comes with two voltage regulator i.e. 5V and 3.3V which provides the flexibility to regulate the voltage as per requirements as compared to Arduino Pro Mini which comes with only one voltage regulator.

• There is no much difference between Arduino Uno and Arduino Mega except later comes with more memory space, bigger size and more I/O pins.

• Arduino software called Arduino IDE is used to program the board which is a common software used for all boards belonged to Arduino family.

• Availability of Atmega16 on the board makes it different than Arduino Pro Mini which uses USB to serial converter to program the board.

• There is a reset button and 4 hardware serial port called USART which produces a maximum speed for setting up communication.

Arduino Programming

• Arduino Mega 2560 can be programmed using Arduino Software called IDE which supports C programming.

• The code you make on the software is called sketch which is burned in the software and then transferred to the board through USB cable.

• This board comes with a built-in bootloader which rules out the usage of an external burner for burning the code into the board.

• The bootloader communicates using STK500 protocol.

• Once you compile and burn the program on the board, you can unplug the USB cable which eventually removes the power from the board. When you intend to incorporate the board into your project, you can power it up using power jack or Vin of the board.

• Multitasking is another feature where Arduino mega comes handy. However, Arduino IDE Software doesn’t support multitasking feature but you can use other operating systems like FreeRTOS and RTX to write C program for this purpose. This gives you the flexibility of using your own custom build program using ISP connector.