# Arduino Mega 2560



## walterb (Jul 27, 2010)

My wife just purchased this board for me (15 year anniversary present). I have never used a programmable board before. I run my haunt off of booboxes. Does anyone have any tips or links to jump start me? A simple summary of what can be controlled with this board would be great too.


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## hedg12 (Jul 6, 2008)

Never used one myself, but there are a ton of people that swear by them. Check out the Arduino forums, Sparkfun's forums, and Adafruit's forums for starters. There are more out there too, I'm sure. There are a few people here that use them - I'm sure they'll chime in.


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## hedg12 (Jul 6, 2008)

Oh yeah, and Happy Anniversary!


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## HomeyDaClown (Oct 3, 2009)

Happy 15th.......

Wow makes me feel old......mine was 15 years ago.....

Tod Bot over at ThingM has some great tutorial pdfs that also include some haunt oriented setups:

Intro classes 1-4:

http://todbot.com/blog/2007/11/15/bionic-arduino-class-notes-1-2/

http://todbot.com/blog/2007/11/24/bionic-arduino-class-notes-3-4/

Spooky Projects:

http://todbot.com/blog/spookyarduino/

With 54 digital _input_/_output_ pins (including 14 PWMs) you'll have lots o room to play on a Mega for sure.
You will have quite a controller on your hands in no time.


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## VexFX (Sep 27, 2011)

I've worked a lot with Arduino in film props, robotics, and animatronics. It's a great (and flexible) platform. One of the best aspects is the large development community, which is an extremely handy resource.

I suggest starting with some of the basic tutorials and demo scripts. Learn how to detect various inputs, and control various outputs. Then you can put those together to create any number of amazing things.

And congrats!


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## Cole&Jacksdad (Jan 20, 2011)

I use an Ardunio to run all my props in my garage haunt. Multabe inputs and outputs. Once you get the hang of programing(just play around with the template programs) it is pretty easy. I do use a relay board so not to burn up the Arduino.


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## goneferal (Sep 8, 2010)

I used one to control my lighting last year.
Here's a test video:




This is pretty good dusk footage:




Here's a somewhat crappy video of the whole yard:


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