We built a basic robot. Unfortunately, the Robotics Invention System 2.0 CD was only meant for older versions of Windows computers and we only had Windows 7 on all of our PC's (trust me, I hate Windows. I, personally, use a Mac computer). I tried running the installation disc anyways. I was able to install the basic drivers for the IR Tower and that was it. Still, after the installation, the IR Tower was not communicating with the RCX. Doing a quick search online I had found that there was an update to the IR Tower drivers that corrected the problem. After updating the drivers, the IR Tower was able to find the RCX. The only problem...the programming software for the RCX did not work. The Software was the easy type where it had a full GUI with drag and drop programs, easy for little kids to program the RCX.
Again doing some more research I found out that the RCX can be programmed in a language called NQC, which stands for Not Quite C. I found software that would let me program it in this language (Bricks Command Center). It was pretty much a text editor that let you type in all the code. It would then compile it and download it to the RCX.
Another problem....I did not know anything about NQC. Like always, I searched online and found a tutorial on NQC. It was actually way easier than what I had thought it would be. I was able to learn the language in about 2 days..not that bad.
Today I had set up an obstacle course to navigate the robot around. The problem was that it was in a different room than our Windows7 desktop was in, which meant that I would need to get the software onto a laptop. Unfortunately all of our Windows computers, are used for other things constantly during that day, and would not be practical to use for programming on. The only other option would be for me to load the software on Windows 7 in a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. I already had Windows 7 as a virtual machine on my Mac so it was just a matter of installing the software. After installing it I just had to plug in the IR Tower. Because of running on a virtual machine I had to map the USB ports on the Mac to the virtual machine. That was easy to do but as I was doing it, the virtual machine program (Oracle VM Virtual Box Manager) stalled and ended up crashing. Now whenever I try to start Windows 7 through the virtual machine, the virtual machine hangs up and eventually crashes. Now I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. If anybody has any suggestions, please let me know. I am also waiting for Mac OS Lion to come out, so hopefully that will fix some of the issues. I will keep you posted on the robot.
