Thursday, January 8, 2009

Trouble Shooting......With more that should be coming later today....

So I worked for about 30 minutes this morning on trying to figure out what is going on, why I can't get the program to transfer to the RCX. To show some other readers out there, who are not familiar with the set up....


The yellow brick is the RCX unit shown in another the post. The black unit standing up, is the IR transimitter, which is hooked up to the computer. The connection that it uses is a 9-pin serial connection (My guess what be that new models of the Lego Robots are now coming with USB connection....to answer a question of how it connects to the computer....according to the help that is linked in the next paragraph).

In the sense of trying to figure out why stuff won't transfer, I have tried googling the error message and got what I felt was very little help.... Try inserting new batteries into the RCX unit.....So Right now...This is what my "built" robot looks like.....


Two large pieces....because the battery section is on the bottom of the RCX, which makes sense for the buttons need to go on top....but it is a pain to change batteries then once the robot is built.

When that didn't work yesterday, I took books home with me to see if I could figure anything out. While since the message that I was getting was about the IR transmitter, I thought that maybe it some how drained its battery and needed a new one. So that is where I started this morning: Changing the 9 volt battery. I also checked the computer to make sure that the Device Manger was showing the port working (it was) and then told it to check for a new driver update (nothing was out there that was better....according to Windows)

The good news is that I got the IR transmitter to transfer the firmware to the RCX (it had "disappeared" since the batteries must have been out of the RCX unit for longer than a minute). Evidence:


The green light that is showing is blinks and lights up when the IR transmitter is transmitting data.

The numbers keep adding one while the firmware is transferring.

And that is all the farther I have gotten so far, as I had to run and go do something for a couple of hours....I am now back and am going to try to convince the software on the computer, the IR transmitter and the RCX unit to all work together and transfer the program!

Time Worked So far today: 1 hour
Time worked over all: 10 hours 30 minutes

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