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LEGO Setup and LEJOS Setup in Windows Environment

These instructions are from our TA, Huang Weihua.

You need to set up the IR Tower given in the LEGO Mindstorms Kit so that your computer can communicate with the RCX. Follow the steps below:

  1. Insert the CD given, the set up process with automatically start. If not, click the "Setup.exe" file included in the CD.
  2. Follow the instructions during the process. After everything finishes, you should have two things installed in your computer: the basic IR Tower driver, and the Robotics Invention System 2.0.
  3. Plug the IR Tower into the USB port on your PC. If the system asks for hardware driver, choose "automatic installation" and the files needed are automatically copied into the system folder.
  4. Start the "Robotics Invention System 2.0" program and follow the instructions given. At certain moment, the communication between the IR Tower and the RCX is tested. If a link is established, then the firmware provided by LEGO is downloaded into the RCX.

For those people using Windows98/WindowsME/Windows200, the IR Tower is ready for use now. For the Windows XP user, however, there is a danger that your system will freeze once you communicate with the RCX. This is due to the new technology called "hyperthreading processors" used in newer version of Windows XP. Thus you need to download a patch to solve this problem. The patch can be found through the URL below: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~kanmy/courses/3243_2005/LegoTower.zip

There is an installation instruction file inside the zip. Basically you need to unplug the IR Tower first, then unzip the patch file and then click the "Setup" included inside. At the end of the driver updating process, you will be asked to plug back the IR Tower. Now if you try to communicate with the RCX through IR Tower again, there should be no problem.

Note that the programming toolkit provided in Robotics Invention System 2.0 only has a graphical interface and it's not easy to write complicated program with it. As required, you need to use LEJOS instead. You can download the LEJOS setup files and the documentation through the following URL: http://lejos.sourceforge.net/download.html

If you cannot access the webpage, you can also download from here: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~kanmy/courses/3243_2005/lejos_win32_2_1_0.zip http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~kanmy/courses/3243_2005/lejos_win32_2_1_0.doc.zip

Unzip the two files into any folder. Look for a file named "CLICKME.html". Detailed installation instructions are provided inside.

You also need to install JDK(version 1.1 or above), if you don't have one yet, you can find a copy from here: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~it1002/j2sdk-1_4_2-windows-i586.exe

To add class path and environment variable in Windows XP, you can right click on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop, then choose "Properties". Go to the "advanced" panel, and select "Environment Variables". Now you should be able to create a new system variable by clicking the "New" button, or add a class path by choosing the variable "Path" and then clicking the "Edit" button. You may need to restart your computer to see the effect of these changes.

Min-Yen Kan <kanmy@comp.nus.edu.sg> Created on: Tue Feb 10 13:54:48 2004 | Version: 1.0 | Last modified: Mon Mar 7 16:44:25 2005