What are the differences between the Arduino MEGA (RB-Ard-13) and the DFRobot ATMega1280 MEGA USB (RB-Dfr-09)?
This question has come up often because the boards look physically identical but there is a significant difference in retail price. The two boards are in fact identical. “Arduino” is open-source, meaning they not only allow but encourage other companies to dowload, use and reproduce their EAGLE files and schematics. The only exception is if a company wants to use the name “Arduino”; they would need to pay a small licensing fee to Arduino and go through an approval process. In this case, DFRobot copied the board (legally) and called it the “DFRobot ATMega1280 MEGA USB”. Here is an excerpt from the Arduino website:
I want to make my own boards to sell or give away to the public.
*Great, we are happy to see Arduino derivatives. One of the core ideas behind open hardware is that anyone should be able to make hardware to suit their own needs, and we’re proud to support that. We’d encourage you to make your products unique to the market in some way. *
*We’d love to hear about your ideas - a little coordination and planning can go a long way. We may be able to give you advice on making your products more useful to the Arduino community, help in making them available to people in other countries, or adapt the Arduino software to work with your hardware. *
Of course, if you’d rather go it alone, you’re free to do so. The Creative Commons licenses under which the Arduino designs are released don’t require any permission for use. We’d still like to hear from you about it, so we know what’s out there. But see the next question for information on the use of the name “Arduino”.