New Arduino Mega & Interview with Tom Igoe
As you should know by now, Arduino is a fantastic microcontroller platform featuring a simple data input and outputs along with an easy to learn programming environment. Now the boys over at tinker.it have come out with the Arduino’s big brother – the Arduino MEGA! Make recently met up with Tom Igoe of the Arduino team to talk about the new board, check the video interview above.
- See also: Top 40 Arduino Projects of the Web
The Arduino Mega is based on the ATmega1280 and 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, 128 KB of flash memory, USB connection, 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 fully compatible with most shields designed for the Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila.
Of course, it can be powered via USB connection or DC power adapter and has a resettable polyfuse that protect the computer from overcurrent or a short.
May 30th, 2009
RE: @5.46 I have just spent a little while getting an old parrallax BS2 to do exactly that as a school project.
it worked quite well, but the text “hello world” was quite flickery, the poor thing just didn’t have the same speed as the AVR based arduino (admittedly, I dont know the set up of the code, but I was only able to scan one LED at a time – in the same fashion as pixels on a TV).
anyway, I’m defiantly going to have to get my hands on an arduino soon.
May 30th, 2009
Definitely worth the investment Neil.