ELEGOO Mega 2560 Board

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

Performs as expected and saved money

Great product ant it is easy to use.

Bought for my husband who lent out his ATmega2560 board to a friend and never got it back. Arrived in good condition and he says it's in good working condition. He let me know that he hasn't used it yet becuase he doesn't have a project for it yet but happy with the product as a whole. He has a lot of Elegoo products (electronics boards, 3D printers, filament, etc) and recommends their products.

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).