Copyright © 2015 Robot Circuits, LLC
5
RCAT-1A Rev A3 Designer’s manual
Serious Power for the Serious Designer
Introduction
Welcome to the world of RCAT™ – We here at Robot Circuits believe you will find that the RCAT™ control board
is simply the most versatile, powerful, easy to use, and cost-effective control board on the market today.
This manual will introduce you to the many features that are resident on the board and will guide you through the
process of configuring the board for your specific application. But before we get started, please allow us to give you a
little background on why we even bothered bringing this board into existence…
First things first…
So what in the world does “RCAT™”mean?
Well, RCAT™ is an acronym for:
R
obotic
C
ontroller based on the
AT
Mega™ 2560 microcontroller by Atmel Corporation.
The RCAT™ is, put quite simply, one of the most powerful low-cost single board Microcontroller boards available on the
robotic enthusiast market today.
Consider this summary of the RCAT’s features:
The RCAT™ is based on the Atmel ATMega™ 2560 Microcontroller which features
o
256K of Program Flash ROM
o
4K internal EEPROM
o
8K internal SRAM
o
4 High-speed USARTS
o
SPI port
o
TWI (I2C) Interface
o
Watchdog timer
o
Many more features that you can view at Atmel.com
Direct access to 48 of the ATMega™ 2560’s most crucial I/O ports
Two 30V/400mA Mosfet drivers
128K External Static RAM (directly addressable by the ATMega™ 2560 as 2 pages of 64K each)
Most communications interfaces feature selectable as 3.3V/5V
Diagnostic 3-color LED
1M-bit Serial EEPROM
14 different communications devices/electrical interfaces/protocols/voltage levels
Power switch connection
Selectable onboard Vcc regulation or 5Vdc primary power input
On-board 3.3Vdc voltage regulator
Easy connection to Network via Serial-Ethernet Server (not included)
On-board USB connector with bridge to serial I/O system
3 channels of RS-232 RX/TX
ADXL345 3-Axis Accelerometer for fast, accurate measurement of inertial and attitudinal situations
Connectors oriented for easy connection to sonars, servo’s or any device requiring typical Gnd/Vcc/Signal
connections
