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

PostPosted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 8:18 am
by 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.

PostPosted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 8:19 am
by roschler
Forgot to log in. Above post is from me.

Thanks.

PostPosted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 2:51 pm
by jrhees
I'll check into it... There's a good chance the Minstorms uses a serial protocol which is not a fixed stream...

-Jon

PostPosted: Sun Mar 13, 2005 7:02 pm
by Guest
Jon,

Thanks, looking forward to what you discover.

roschler

PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 1:33 am
by lafugitt
jrhees wrote: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".

Re: Any way to learn codes from a Lego Mindstorms USB IR Tow

PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 2:11 am
by lafugitt
Anonymous wrote: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....