• Lego Rcx 1.0 Software Download

I found one of the original Lego Mindstorms kits at a garage sale and I had to buy it. I have wanted one of these for a while, but I never got around to buying one. Now that they are somewhat antiquated, you can usually pick them up pretty cheaply. Because these sets are nearly 20 years old, there are usually some problems, so once I got my set working I thought I would document the process for others to follow. The main problem with Mindstorms RCX is the lack of support from Lego for these old sets. According to what I have read and some experience, the sets only really work well under Windows 98.

People found ways to make them work under heavily patched copies of Windows XP, but since Microsoft no longer supports XP and the patches from Lego aren't available anymore, I had to find an alternative to the Lego software. There are still a few sites around that support the original Mindstorms RCX sets, but they are disappearing and the information on them is less valuable as we move away from the versions of Windows that were supported. There are still a handful of good sites out there and they may not be maintained, but you can use the to read the pages they used to link to. This Mindstorms set is version 1.5, which includes an RCX brick that does not have an external power connector. I plugged in 6 AA batteries and tried to turn it on. Everything worked so I tested the sensors.

When you attach and press the push sensors, a little arrow appears on the LCD below the number that the sensor is attached to. I plugged a motor into the motor port and cycled through the programs that were already saved on the RCX. I found a program that ran the motor forward and stopped it if you pressed the push sensor. After the batteries have been out for a long time, all programs that were loaded on the RCX will be wiped out. The brick will default back to the standard programs. I found this site that has the original inventory for this set.

I didn't actually go through the list to check everything. I just looked to see how many motors and sensors were supposed to be here and went from there. These pictures are from another RCX brick that I bought separately because it was an RCX 1.0 with the external barrel jack connector. This allows you to power the RCX brick and your whole project with an external power supply instead of batteries. Included in the auction was one of the RCX IR remotes that came from a different set. This allows you to remotely control movements and begin any of the 5 saved programs.

It's not actually necessary to disassemble the RCX unless you have to repair something, but I like to take things apart and I was already thinking of a future project, so I decided to take the brick apart. It's handy to know what parts go into something. The RCX is basically an LCD display, a microcontroller chip, a couple H-bridges, a speaker, an IR LED and receiver and some button and Lego wire connector contact. Is a good site that details the internals of the RCX brick. The safest way to do this is to remove all the screws and press the first and last battery contacts out of the battery compartment. To push the contacts out you have to press the little release clip on the contact that prevents it from slipping back through the hole in the plastic.

Once that is released, you can gently pry and work the plastic shell apart. Work slowly because it can get bound up and you could easily crack or break something.

There are a few tiny pieces that hold the PC board to the upper case that will break if you are not careful. There are some sets that came with a USB version of the RCX IR tower, unfortunately I don't have that one and serial ports are getting hard to find on laptop computers.

I bought this because it has a very long list of supported operating systems and includes drivers for each. I also liked this one because it didn't have a wire so it just plugs onto the end of whatever serial device you have and converts it to a USB device. It works great and I have been very happy with this adapter.

I have since heard that the USB drivers are not supported in more modern versions of Windows. If you have the serial version, it still works in Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit) as long as you use NQC instead of the original Lego software. My set didn't come with the original installation disk, but I wanted to try programming the RCX brick with the LEGO OEM software before branching out. Unfortunately, you can't find this software on the Lego website anymore. You can buy replacement disks on Ebay, but you can also find a few torrents still floating around where you can download the Lego Robot Invention System (RIS) 2.0.

The websites that tell you how to patch and install the old RIS software are slowly disappearing, but you can usually still find a website or two that is still linking to a site that used to contain some good information. I was able to paste these links into the and gather the information I needed. This software was originally written for Windows 98se, but it will still work under Windows XP (32 bit only) with patches that Lego distributed. Unfortunately, those patches are no longer available, so my best option was a virtual machine running Windows 98se. I downloaded software which allowed me to create a virtual machine running 98, but I couldn't get the USB to Serial adapter I bought to pass through the host computer to the 98 client machine. I could have bought another adapter, or bought a USB version of the Lego IR tower off Ebay, but I decided to scrap the original plan and start with something that will work on my Windows 7 machine. According to what I have read, the Lego IR USB tower has drivers that will work under XP, or Windows 7 32 bit, but not 64 bit.

The serial tower will work in Windows 7 64 bit, but since most computers don't have serial ports, you still need the adapter. I recommend the serial tower and serial adapter I mentioned in the last step. I have used this under Windows 7 64 bit and they work great. There are a handful of different programming languages ( (Not Quite C), etc) or after market IDE's (, etc) that are available to use with the RCX. There is even a Perl package on that interfaces with the RCX through a serial IR tower. Since it seems like the most has been written about NQC and BRICXCC, I decided to go this route.

BRICXCC and NQC are terrific. The language is easy to understand for anyone who has any experience with C/C or any language with C like syntax. People familiar with Arduino will definitely be able to pick this up. The tools built into BRICXCC are very powerful, intuitive and robust.

Lego Rcx 1.0 Software Download

Is one of the many great NQC tutorials available online. To use the BRICXCC controls and my IR remote control, I had to update the firmware on my RCX brick with one of these.

You can use an after market firmware, but I wanted to keep things as original as possible to limit the troubleshooting later. One odd thing I noticed while programming the brick with the IR tower, I was changing the channel on my TV and it caused the communication to fail. There is an awful lot of communication between the RCX brick and the IR tower, and while I had them right next to each other, the TV remote being used anywhere in the room caused the communication to fail. It also caused the TV not to get the signal from the remote. I got into Arduino before I ever bought a Mindstorms kit.

I loved playing with Technic when I was a kid, but Mindstorms didn't come out until later. There are some quirky little things that I dislike, like how the brick loses your programs and updated firmware if you take the batteries out for too long. I assume this is because Flash memory wasn't very common until after digital cameras drove the price down.

Overall, I really enjoy this set and I find that I could have avoided building more complex projects if I had Mindstorms to use in projects like my. The RCX speaker is very easy to use and the BRICKXCC software includes a tool for converting music files to code for the RCX brick to play. The code is not all that different from how I have created music files (by hand!) for Arduino in my and projects. In the future, if I need to make music with Arduino I will open up BRICKXCC and use their tools to generate the code I need and adapt it to fit Arduino. This is a big improvement over doing this manually. We came into possession of two sets of these monsters. I had never even heard of them before, imagine my shock in finding out they were 20 years old!

I dug around and found an XP laptop and even though I have the XP drivers for the USB IR tower, I cannot get either one of them to work. So I'm going to walk it backward to a serial setup instead to see if I can get it working that way.

My 11-year-old is excited to play with them. Had I not found your post I would have not known the age of these things. Thanks for this. I just inherited a Mindstorms RCX 1.0 set from my brother-in-law along with the book and companion NQC CD. The control box (with the barrel connector for AC power), IR tower, Serial cable, motors and RCX bots are ALL there, and 95% of the kit pieces are there. My son (8) is a bit younger than the recommended age for the kit, although he starts with his own Lego Robotics at school very soon. What's the best way to start.should I just move ahead with the NQC at least for testing and diagnostic of the kit, or try something else?

I probably still have a Win7 machine here so it's possible to get things running. Good luck with your set. I didn't have much luck with the OEM software, but I did get NWC running pretty well with BrickXCC. If nothing else, you can definitely load the firmware with that. If you can't load the firmware you might have the same issue that I did with the Oracle virtual machine tool. Everything seemed to be working together but the Lego software couldn't make a connection to the hardware.

Even thigh I specifically designated the USB adapter to be shared with the virtual machine, it just wouldn't work. Try BrickXCC instead. 1: Cost - these sets can be found for less than a fifth the cost of an EV3 2: Adaptability - the original Robotics Invention System had more parts than an NXT or EV3 set, and had a much greater variety as well. This meant that the kit wasn't just for beginners - it had enough to build much, much more advanced creations as well.

Personally, I don't think the later versions of Mindstorms could live up to that standard. They were designed to be as simple to use as possible, containing only very basic elements, and with that they lost the variety and complexity that made the RIS so appealing. The only problem, as this instructable points out, is the lack of support on modern operating systems.

I am helping my son with his 8th grade project - building a robot using my old RCX. I haven't used it in quite some time and have switched to Mac from PC.

I followed the various tutorials and got the software to compile with a few minor changes. But now when I try to run firmdl I get this:% firmdl mode = slow tty= /dev/cu.usbserial-FTDJS8F4 writelen = 4 W 0000: 10 fe 10 fe recvlen = 0 writelen = 4 W 0000: 10 fe 10 fe recvlen = 0 Open failed: tower not responding, errno = 60 My setup is an FTDI serial adapter plugged into a USB port on my macbook. I have verified that the adapter works by looping pin 2 to pin 3 and seeing characters echoed back in my command line serial terminal (nanokdp). I tried the same thing by looping pins 2 and 3 at the far end of the Lego serial cable, but that doesn't work. Upon probing the cable I find that pin 2 is straight through from one end to the other, but it appears that pins 3 and 4 are swapped. Looping 2 to 4 at the far end of the lego cable also does not produce an echo.

Some internet reading told me that the tower comms is 2400/8/1 with odd parity. I used these settings in my serial terminal connected to the tower but got no response.

I read in some places that there should be a green LED on the tower? I don't see that either. The battery in the tower is a brand new 9V battery, and the batteries in the RCX are freshly recharged. The RCX powers up and seems functional, and is pointed at the tower at a distance of about 6 inches. I am using Java version 1.6. OS version is 10.8.5 Oh yeah, I also tried lejosfirmdl:% lejosfirmdl Use -help for options.

/Users/sravet/Documents/ravetracing/lejos/lejos210/bin/./bin/lejos.srec: image contains no data I don't understand this either, because the specified srec file seems to contain plenty of data. Anyway, my son and I would certainly appreciate some assistance getting this working for his project. Any suggestions? Thanks, -steve.