retrolefty:
But even still, the mega2560 in general seems to be poorly supported. I mean look at some of the threads which talk about broken bootloaders (wdt & flash protocol), broken libcs (still broken in the latest 1.7.1), so on and so on. Many of these seem to largely plague the 2560 platform and in many cases, the problems seems to have been ignored for very large spans of time. Its disappointing to say the least.
Both the Uno and mega2560 boards have had more then their fair share of problems and bugs. The new 8u2 serial converter chips and the new bootloaders were probably not quite ready for prime time when released to the wild. Not sure the current IDE release even has the latest corrected fixes yet, and of course a lot of user contributed libraries are not 2560 aware, but that's not a fault of the arduino team. I know SparkFun had to replace a lot of the early Uno (or mega2560?) boards for one of the early bugs.
Lefty
Eeek. Well, that doesn't sound good. From reading other threads, it seems my board wasn't alone in having an entirely incorrect 8u2 firmware. Seems others have reported theirs have been loaded with uno firmware; or at least that's what it identified itself as.
Lefty, do you have the impression things are improving for the 2560 or is it to become the red headed step child of arduinos? Thus far it certainly doesn't seem likes its getting much love.