Arduino Mega and Prototype Shield Assembly
I've had some Sunday afternoon fun and games with the assembly of a prototyping shield. It is the design from e-lioness and is for the new Arduino Mega board. The new Arduino Mega board is designed to wow, with 128 KB of Flash or program memory, 8KB of RAM, and 4 KB of EEPROM. The board has a massive 54 digital pins (14 of these offer PWM output), 16 analog io pins, 4 hardware serial ports, and I2C. It is compatible with most of the earlier shields designed for the standard Arduino. The firmware includes the now standard, auto-reset on upload, a pre-burned bootloader, and automatic power selection. It does need you to update your Arduino to at least Arduino version 0015 or later. Here is a little table comparing the latest hardware from the Arduino and a close mid capacity derivative from the RepRap project, the Sanguino.
![ArduinoSanguinoComparison](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vAu7dbt51NnqIhhJdiTHWOidQzvNlrLxof1BVBK9UnuvCYxgXYjgGwKWF64WTpVz2DQVMe7Czxj1XY9caCNgm9tqmCDofdiDZ8HEJXEQ1RlRNu9GhGPUDs1sG7g5hBlTw=s0-d)
The Arduino Mega is a very sweet option for installations and sensor heavy projects.
Here's the starting picture:
![outofthebox](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tI69R5g8lAeMbnolMYeevagGi1NH5L46Aunptg27fuP8CMPeHySeX33nDT6KEBWgNmCtvglocN4FNPHUEFdEx7aHmQ_ygiF8cYrtmWmWKFgmBp_0c1p45OBGLE8d3Urdol=s0-d)
Here's how it ended up:
![finished-topview](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_twcCvb_jKrFzgJzegCs91WgJ8EG6Gs7egZW5Z5vWdZ2OPxC7AkizJUxMFAG2kgwXtB2DY2ikymFgFDrq8ZtIHw51BJXi-WVGYOzGkSoC1A1rMYAhahB5awH5OSMiX5NHR5kw=s0-d)
The process is visually documented in my Flickr images and doesn't really need any more documentation. I would possibly check around to see if other prototyping shields have a better track layout for the digital pins as this turned out to be a little messy.
An example of the fun you can have with the Arduino Mega is shown by Tom Igoe's post on ``8×8 LED matrix control on an Arduino Mega''. He has a great example using it to play Pong.
The Arduino Mega is a very sweet option for installations and sensor heavy projects.
Here's the starting picture:
Here's how it ended up:
The process is visually documented in my Flickr images and doesn't really need any more documentation. I would possibly check around to see if other prototyping shields have a better track layout for the digital pins as this turned out to be a little messy.
An example of the fun you can have with the Arduino Mega is shown by Tom Igoe's post on ``8×8 LED matrix control on an Arduino Mega''. He has a great example using it to play Pong.
Labels: arduino, arduino mega, arduino mega prototype shield, physical computing, prototype shield
3 Comments:
Are the eagle files available?
By
Anonymous, at 10:36 a.m.
The Mega's Eagle files plus schematics are available on its Arduino Page as for the files for the shield, I haven't seen any online but it should be easily enough to build one from the existing examples.
By
Eoin Brazil, at 11:07 a.m.
I remember when a computer with the same specs used to be the size of a bedroom!
By
backup contacts, at 6:11 p.m.
Post a Comment
<< Home