[vox-tech] mindstorms

[David Margolis]

Was obtaining the serial (which I presume is the "old" IR tower)
difficult?  Where did you find it.  I suppose you could buy the
old set on eBay or off the shelf of a store.

Here's another question: Do you suppose one could configure the built
in IR port on a laptop to talk to the RCX?  It would be neat if I could
type little bits of code and beam them over that way!

Dave

On Sat, 6 Jul 2002, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

> ok, i obtained the serial IR tower.
>
> i plugged the tower into my server, satan (the 2nd serial port).  After
> putting batteries into the RCX and downloading the Mindstorm 1.5
> firmware from katherine's website, i ran:
>
> nqc -S/dev/ttyS1 -firmware firm0309.lgo
>
> in the console, it printed:
>
> .draining
> .draining
> .draining
> .draining
> .draining
> .draining
>
> a whole bunch of times.  "00000" appeared on the RCX and it began to
> increase.  presumably, "draining" means the process of writing data from
> an output buffer to the tower and the numbers on the RCX are almost
> certainly the number of bytes read by the RCX.
>
> finally, the following appeared on the console:
>
> Current Version: 00030001/00030009
>
> and the RCX sang a pleasant tune.  i take this to be a good sign.
>
> pete
>
> ps- there is now a linux usb tower kernel driver.  i'll try it out
> tonight.
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