USB Tower and RCX and win2K

[ndr114]

My apologies if this has been asked before. I did spend the better part of an hour searching the forum for an answer before posting this.

I'm just getting started with BricxCC and I'd like to use the USB tower to communicate with my Ancient first release RCX brick.
1. Is this even possible?
2. I get no response when I plug in the USB tower on my Windows 2000 machine.

Is there any hope or should I give it up and go back to Windows 98 and a serial port version of the tower?

Thanks in advance.

[afanofosc]

You definitely need to have the USB tower drivers installed. I'm pretty sure I've used the tower with the RCX and BricxCC on W2k before. You can download the 2.5 LEGO MINDSTORMS SDK from Philo's website. The link is on the main BricxCC page. Make sure the SDK is installed. With the right drivers installed Windows should recognize the tower when it is connected and it should show in the Device Manager as a LEGO device.

John Hansen

[mattallen37]

I know that there are not USB IR Tower drivers available for a W7 64 bit system, but how hard would it be to make them? I would really like to be able to use my collection of RCXs without having to use an old/different computer.

[ndr114]

Thanks! That was the clue I needed. For the record, the Driver version that shows up on LEGO USB Tower Properties is 1.0.50.164.

Thanks again!

[mightor]

I know that there are not USB IR Tower drivers available for a W7 64 bit system, but how hard would it be to make them? I would really like to be able to use my collection of RCXs without having to use an old/different computer.

If you have the serial port one (which I do), it works fine with one of those USB-Com port dongle doodads. Perhaps you can see if you can pick up one of those instead.

Alternatively, use VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation to run an older version of Windows and connect the IR Tower to that instead.

- Xander

[mattallen37]

I do have the serial tower. I do NOT have a serial port on this computer though, so I would need to get the "adapter" thing. So if I got the adapter and all, the serial IR tower doesn't need the drivers?

[mightor]

I didn't and it worked very nicely

- Xander

[mesheets]

One of my thoughts in this area has been to create a lightweight Linux virtual machine and do a USB pass-through of the Lego USB IR Tower to the Linux VM. I have been working with the SliTaz distribution to create packages that would be of use for the RCX. Though I think it will work well in the long term, it has involved a lot of non-RCX development things, such as time to create packages and get them working. Additionally, I don't know that Bricx Command Center will work under Linux with the RCX.

Some of the packages out there in the "cooking" area include the Linux Lego USB Tower driver, the H8300 toolchain (including gdb), nqc, and Esterel-lego. I have a BrickOS package in the works, but it is not yet ready.

Also, if you are interested in Linux driver development, here is a link on some information that is available for updating the Linux Lego USB Tower driver to support more advanced functionality.
* http://news.lugnet.com/robotics/rcx/legos/?n=4066

[mattallen37]

I am not really interested in learning about how to make Linux drivers at this time. Although it is sort of a bummer that the lego USB tower isn't supported by a 64-bit windows OS (and that I have two of them), the serial tower should always work. Once my USB to RS-232 adapter gets here, I should be able to use an official tower, instead of my home-made one.

[sparramc]

Alternatively, use VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation to run an older version of Windows and connect the IR Tower to that instead.

- Xander

Both the Serial & USB versions of the RCX Towers work fine on my LinuxMint amd64 Box, using WinXP 32Bit as a VitualMachine with VirtualBox.

And it's the only way to run any flavour of MS Windows reliably anyway!

The RCX USB Tower also works with both Linux amd64 & 32Bit flavours. Pays to have the Tower Connected when you install Linux, rather than trying to get it working manually....

legousbtower-0.5.4.tar.gz

RCX USB Source Code

(22.25 KiB) Downloaded 356 times

source code may be of some use to you Matt? Can't remember where I found it..

Tower164.zip

RCX USB Tower Drivers

(186 KiB) Downloaded 360 times

always seem to just work for me on any Win PC!