Arduino is an open-source phys­i­cal com­put­ing plat­form based on a sim­ple i/o board and a devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment that imple­ments thePro­cess­ing/Wiring lan­guage. Arduino can be used to devel­op stand-alone inter­ac­tive objects or can be con­nect­ed to soft­ware on your com­put­er (e.g. Flash, Pro­cess­ing, MaxM­SP). The open-source IDE can be down­loaded for free (cur­rent­ly for Mac OS X, Win­dows, and Lin­ux).The Arduino Mega 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 MHzcrys­tal 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.The Mega 2560 R3 also adds SDA and SCL pins next to the AREF. In addi­tion, there are two new pins placed near the RESET pin. One is the IOREF that allow the shields to adapt to the volt­age pro­vid­ed from the board. The oth­er is a not con­nect­ed and is reserved for future pur­pos­es. The Mega 2560 R3 works with all exist­ing shields but can adapt to new shields which use these addi­tion­al pins.Fea­tures:ATmega2560 micro­con­trollerInput volt­age — 7–12V54 Dig­i­tal I/O Pins (14 PWM out­puts)16 Ana­log Inputs256k Flash Mem­o­ry16Mhz Clock SpeedDoc­u­ments:Arduino Home PageSchemat­icPro­gram­ming Ref­er­ence