User manual

RP6 ROBOT SYSTEM - 1. Introduction
The main fuse has been changed from 2.5A to 3.15A, as there are now some addition-
al power supply connectors and the power distribution has been improved. This allows
usage of slightly higher power expansions. The Motor Drivers have been improved
with new more powerful and more reliable MOSFETs. These have even lower resist-
ance than the ones used before.
All these modifications increase the cost significantly. Over the last few years there
were also lots of increases in production cost, thus we can not include a Experiment
Expansion Board for free any longer, this has to be purchased seperately. The rest of
the Robot has not changed much, in order to keep the Software 100% compatible. If
you need more processing power or additional I/Os, you can choose frome three ex-
pansion boards: the RP6-M32, the RP6-CC128 and the new
RP6v2-M256-WIFI. These provide a lot of additional processing power and lots of in-
terfaces for sensors and actors.
The RP6-M32 is the lowest cost option and adds another ATMEGA32, which runs at
twice the clock speed as the one on the Robot Base and has several free I/O ports. It
is also very well suited as an addtion to the two bigger expansion modules if the pro-
cessing power of one of these alone is not sufficient for certain sensors or one needs
more I/O.
The RP6-CC128 module allows you to use a C-Control PRO MEGA128 Unit from Conrad
Electronic together with 64KB external SRAM. It comes with a quite comfortable IDE
and allows to use CompactC or BASIC as programming language.
The most powerful expansion module is the new RP6v2-M256-WIFI which will be re-
leased in 2012. Beneath the large ATMEGA2560 (16MHz, 256KB Flash, 8K SRAM) it
also contains a 2.4GHz 802.11g WLAN radio module. This allows you to monitor, con-
trol and remotely program the RP6 via a wireless computer network. The module fea-
tures 60 free I/O Ports with lots of special purpose interfaces like several ADC, PWM,
SPI and UART channels. With all these I/Os you can virtually use any sensor and
actor combination on the RP6. The microSD Card slot allows to add large data
storage of > 2GByte (e.g. for maps, data logging, websites, etc.).
On the two images on this page you can see the RP6 with two expansion
modules (Experiment PCB and RP6-M32 with LCD) and the new RP6v2 with RP6v2-
M256-WIFI (of course it can also be used on the old RP6!), Antenna and LCD. The new
connectors are shown in more detail in the appendix.
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