Copyright © 2015 Robot Circuits, LLC
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RCAT-1A Rev A3 Designer’s manual
Serious Power for the Serious Designer
includes lots of on-board communications capability (possibly our number one requirement)
is affordable
comes with good documentation
is easy to configure and get running for OUR APPLICATION
comes with actual working examples of useful code
It is not difficult to find project boards on the market that are little more than breakout boards, marketed with a
plethora of add-on boards and so-called “shields”. But what about us who need, say, a board that already comes
STANDARD with extended RAM so that we can implement dynamic memory allocation, or realtime O/S capability?
Sometimes we with real jobs and real deadlines just don’t have time or patience to shop around for what should be “the
basics”.
So, we designed the RCAT™ as an end-run around these issues. The RCAT™ comes STANDARD with:
128K of extended static RAM (divided into two 64K pages that are switchable via an I/O port)
An on-board ADXL345 accelerometer for easy inertial and attitudinal measurement
An onboard three-channel RS-232 transceiver
An onboard RS422/485 interface
An onboard USB bridge
An on board 1M-bit non-volatile RAM
Two onboard 30V/400mA mosfet drivers
A 3.3Vdc Voltage regulator with access to the outside world
In addition, we provide COMPLETE, FUNCTIONAL, LOAD-AND-RUN demonstration software that you can use as a
foundation for your application or just for educational purposes. This software is written with Atmel’s Atmel Studio™ in
mind. All that is required to get you up and running is the RCAT™ control board, a connection to an appropriate power
source, a PC capable of connecting to an ICE (in-circuit-emulator), an ICE (in-circuit-emulator) like the ATATMEL-ICE™,
and a download of Atmel’s free Atmel Studio™ IDE. Once installed, you can simply load our project file and begin
running.
Of all the things that have irritated us at Robot Circuits over the years is downloading somebody’s “demo” code, only to
find that it is useless unless we are using some compiler or ide that is mainstream only to super-geeks, and even then
having to study, study, study just to figure out how to set paths, and compiler flags, and this and that and you name it.
Then – to find that the code doesn’t even do what we needed it to do.
We work in the real world and we needed real information that was relevant to solving real problems.
THAT is what we are striving for at Robot Circuits – to provide you with a “no-games”, professional-grade robotic control
platform that can actually DO SOMETHING!
We hope you find that we have accomplished this by helping you to achieve your goals.
Now…..let’s talk tech…
