Arduino Mega 2560 Smart Home Header

Arduino Mega 2560 header board

We started this project, to make it much quicker and easier to build smart home prototypes around Arduino processors. This simple board does plugs into the bottom header on the Arduino Mega 2560 and exposes three 10-Way DIL connector. It uses our standard set of connectors and pin designations. It also includes an LED and resistor which we use to indicator errors.

This is part of our smart home building blocks approach.

Connectors

Arduino Mega 2560 header board

We don't have to fully populate the header board with components. We often only install the parts required for each specific application. For example, this board is being used for our conservatory irrigation system. It is very easy to add more components later if required.

Build

The PCB was designed using Autodesk Eagle and we then had a large number of these boards manufactured for us by JLCPCB at a very low cost for each board.

Learning & Insight

Our smart home building blocks approach to prototyping, developing and testing of new smart home services allows us to try out and test new ideas and concepts very quickly. Arduino based projects are cheap, secure and incredibly reliable. Combined with the software libraries we have developed, we can typically get from idea to working prototype in less than a day. This project represents just one small part of this but makes things much quicker and simpler.