Program LEGO RCX Robots using HiC
Please apologize the terse form of this document. A more complete version
should be available soon.
Getting Started
Note: previous instructions suggested installing LEGO Mindstorms. This
causes problems on WindowsXP systems - the drivers that come with
Mindstorms often lock up the system. The following steps seem to work
reliably, though other methods will likely work as well.
- The first step is to get the tower working. Both the USB and Serial
towers are supported, though only the USB tower has been tested recently.
What you need to do depends on your version of Windows:
- Windows XP: Download Tower164.zip,
unzip the file, and follow Installation_Instructions.txt. More detail is
available from the FAQ
list.
If connecting to the tower causes the system to "freeze", try starting LEGO
USB Tower in the Control panel and changing the Infrared Range to Short.
- On older Windows system: Install LEGO Mindstorms software on your
system and check for
connectivity with the tower.
- Download nqc from
SourceForge. The last version known to work was 3.1 r6.
- Download and run HiC.
- Pick Edit|Options, select the Lego RCX tab, and browse to the location
of nqc.exe. You do not have to set the firmware path unless you want to
use HiC to load the firmware into the RCX brick.
- See the writeup for directions to write and
run a small program.
More Information
- See Help|Library Source|rcx.h in HiC for the complete API.
- To program the RCX robots without installing LEGO Mindstorms, download
the "LEGO Mindstorms SDK" from the LEGO site for the tower driver. Once
the tower driver is installed, HiC should be able to communicate with the
RCX unit with no DLLs installed.