Any way to learn codes from a Lego Mindstorms USB IR Tower?

[Guest]

Hello Jon,

I can learn codes generated by the Lego Mindstorms USB IR Tower, but when I play them back, things don't seem to work.

Could it be because the IR Tower transmits at 2400 baud, instead of 1200? Every thing else I have tried to learn that was consumer IR worked fine, but not the Lego USB Tower.

Is there something else I can try?

Thanks.

[roschler]

Forgot to log in. Above post is from me.

Thanks.

[jrhees]

I'll check into it... There's a good chance the Minstorms uses a serial protocol which is not a fixed stream...

-Jon

[Guest]

Jon,

Thanks, looking forward to what you discover.

roschler

[lafugitt]

I'll check into it... There's a good chance the Minstorms uses a serial protocol which is not a fixed stream...

-Jon

The Mindstorms RIS does use a proprietary serial protocol that's described in some detail here: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~kekoa/rcx/ in the sections titled "IR Transceiver" and "Serial Protocol - Encoding".

[lafugitt]

Hello Jon,
I can learn codes generated by the Lego Mindstorms USB IR Tower, but when I play them back, things don't seem to work.
Could it be because the IR Tower transmits at 2400 baud, instead of 1200? Every thing else I have tried to learn that was consumer IR worked fine, but not the Lego USB Tower.
Is there something else I can try?

Robert,

I'm not sure how deeply you want to get into it, but this document gives a tremendous amount of detail on controlling/programming Mindstorms from Visual Basic: http://www.vorlesungen.uni-osnabrueck.d ... report.pdf
The appendices at the end of the document discuss the serical protocol and include the library calls to communicate between the tower and the RSX. I know you do most of your stuff in Delphi Pascal, but you should be able to lift and modify a lot of the code examples.

That still leaves the question of whether or not you can use the USBUIRT as a substitute for the tower....