ELEGOO Mega 2560 R3 Board, ATmega2560, Compatible with Arduino, Blue

Another great product from Elegoo that is the budget version of the Arduino official one!

This Arduino Mega 2560 R3 clone has proven to be perfectly reliable over the past month. Even when I accidentally shorted a pin directly to ground (and burnt out a port on my USB hub), this guy kept on ticking, with no damage. (Although, admittedly, it would have been nice if its polyfuse had acted faster then, but I can't really fault it. Complete user error.) It seems to be fully compatible with the real Mega 2560 R3, and it required no special drivers for Windows. It worked out of the box with the stock Arduino software. The black soldermask PCB is a nice touch. I also bought their blue version ( Elegoo MEGA 2560 R3 Board ATmega2560 ATMEGA16U2 + USB Cable Compatible With Arduino ) and both seem to work equally as well. Only difference is the color. The port names are silkscreened on the sides of the headers, which is great and something many other Arduino clones do not have. It is much easier reading the clear labels there than on the PCB itself, especially with lots of things connected. The headers aren't soldered PERFECTLY straight but I've rarely seen anyone get that right, and it was so slightly that it doesn't matter in practice. Only if you look close. There was no problem with any of my shields. Only potential complaint was that there were a few copper filaments kind of stick underneath one of the headers. I removed them with a tweezers before powering it on for the first time. They looked like they could have been a remnant from machining through a copper plane during PCB manufacturing(although not I'm sure why the copper planes would go all the way to the edge). Anyway, they were relatively easily removed and not worth deducting a star for. But maybe just give this a quick once-over before plugging it in. Overall, no regrets--especially at ~1/4 the cost of an authentic Mega 2560 R3! It even came with a USB cable (which I haven't used).

I am a retired EE. I spend a lot of time keeping my brain working by doing little electronic projects. I had spent several dozen hours trying to get a PIC project working - all to no avail. The examples I was using were all Arduino based; and I simply couldn't untangle the Arduino code enough to understand the details. So I broke down and bought this in the hopes that if I got it to work I had enough electronic equipment to reverse engineer the signals if not the code. It Worked. But this review is about the Elegoo Mega. I have only done two things with the platform. But I can tell you that both projects worked fine as though I had a "real" Arduino... of course the Arduino stuff is all open source, so maybe I should not be surprised - but it was nice to not have to worry about any compatibility issues as I was learning. I will continue building projects in the PIC Ecosystem... I get to fully understand the inner workings of the code - all of the code. But since the Arduino Ecosystem is so much more vast than any other platform, I am sure that I will continue to use this little board to get a handle on how to jump to another platform... and I don't feel like a traitor to Mcirochip since the AVR products are part of the same company now. If you are worried about build quality or compatibility, based on my very limited experience (the project I was working on touched a lot of the Arduino Ecosystem - so I might not have a "lot" of project experience I number of projects - but I have quite a lot of experience with the Arduino Ecosystem anyway) worry not. This product is very nice indeed...

I love these arduino MCU as they are reliable and fun to program for my Model Railroad.

This "thing," I really like. I can't believe how easy it is to get these going. For the price I paid, this is a "no brainer." What $11 or $12.00 vs 45.00? I will buy a couple of these just to keep on hand in case I damage 1 or 2. It came right up, worked perfectly, simple to run the examples, didn't test all pins, but all I tested worked fine. I haven't figured out what I will do with it, but with all the excitement surrounding these things, I figured I had to have one. I had absolutely ho idea how to get it going and decided to write to Elegoo. (where to start) Within hours I received a reply with some nice lady that included some extremely exacting links. Within minutes following that I had all my "initial questions" answered and about 30 minutes later I had my account set up with Arduino.cc and the web programmer (which i think is MUCH easier to use) working. I really thought I wanted an original. The more I read about the two entities in the "split," the more I left them both. The MEGA 2560 R3 I received from Elegoo seems to run just as well as anything I've read about what I'm calling an original MEGA 2560 R3. Just a note to anyone reading this: If you're interested, I am directly running 3 to 42volt LED's I found on Ebay. Even fade works on the PWM ports. They come with leads and are like $4 for 20 LED's (no resistors needed) ($13 for a hundred) (haven't tried any of the colored LEDs, only white ones, but they worked perfectly)

I like Elegoo clones, but I'm only giving this one 4 out of 5 stars because the sockets for pins 8-SCL are not alligned with all of the other sockets, making it difficult for making shields with generic protoboards. I don't know if this is true of the Arduino mega, but if it is, that's a bad design idea. In my picture you can see that a single standard header strip can connect the digital DIP sockets with the communication socket and the pins 0-7 socket, but won't fit pins 8-SCL. Now this may not be a problem for everyone, but if you wanna make a generic shield that utilizes all of the PWM pins, it's going to be a total hassle. Aside from that, it's a good board, does what it's supposed to do and is affordable, well packaged, and arrives on time. Elegoo's other products have been awesome to me, especially the nano clones and the double sided pcb kits. If the mega board didn't have this one hiccup, I'd give it five stars. I also like how the pins are labeled on the sockets as well as the board. It's a nice touch.

This is a very, very nice clone compared to some other Mega 2560 clones I've purchased on Ebay. It has a real crystal oscillator for the main clock, as well as the EN-RESET trace, and a real ATmega16U2 for USB <> serial interfacing. This last point is important if your project requires the Arduino to appear as another USB device type. The 16U2 can be flashed separately from the ATmega itself to accomplish that. The 16U2 chip is supported directly by the Arduino, so no 3rd party driver is required to upload to the board, as with cheaper clones using the CH340 chip. Compare this to a clone I recently purchased from Ebay. The ISP header was soldered on at an angle, a cheap resonator is used for the clock instead of a crystal, there is no EN-Reset pads (although a cap can be desoldered to do the same thing), and it uses the cheap CH340 USB <> serial chip instead of the Atmel. The bootloader on the Elegoo seems to be the newer STK500v2. The bootloader is configured to NOT flash the on-board LED while waiting for the upload. It will wait 7 seconds on reset before going to the user code, unless it detects serial comms on the USB port that are not from the Arduino IDE. In that case, it jumps to the user code in under a second once it figures out the IDE is not running the serial port. A great buy. I will order again. Well worth the addition $2.00 I paid.

Arrived in great shape and these little arduino mega are so much fun and can make all kinds of projects with them. Ty I highly recommend this 😉😊👊

So good quality

I've used many Elegoo Arduino boards and they've never let me down. I trust Elegoo for their reliability, and it helps that they are competitively priced. Good stuff.

La verdad me asustaba un poco que el producto no llegase a funcionar con la plataforma de arduino o que estuviera hecho con mteriales de mala calidad, sin embargo me sorprendieron con la calidad del producto, llego antes del tiempo establecido y funciona de maravilla dentro de la plataforma.

Good affordable local source of arduino boards. Mega is overkill for my needs but the discount is too good

Fast shipping. The product was in good quality and as described.