Mindboards

Hi, our school has just purchased the Lego Mindstorms educational robotics platform, and the robot part is 9797.

The CD that came with it doesn't install on Mac, so after some searching, I found a patch, for Snow Leopard and above, but it too, doesn't work.

Another teacher has found an .iso somewhere online that seems to be much more up to date... it installs V 2.0.f5. However, the word "Edu" was taken out of the App Folder name. Is that a problem?

Also, it seems there are patches on other lego sites (not mindstorms), that look like they go with this version, and update it even further... the patch is labeled "2.1.f5" which to me looks more recent than 2.0.f5.

Is this correct? What version should we be at? Can you point to the link for the latest versions? And I need to start programming this robot, and am overwhelmed by the different sites and methods of programming I see for this thing. Should I use the Visual method, Assembly method, BCC method, etc? A brief guiding helping hand pointing me in the right direction would be hugely appreciated!

Thanks,
Jason

Jason,

There are lots of options, and they generally vary depending on what you want to do.

The most important thing for you right now is that any version of the LEGO software will work. There are some small differences between the "EDU" version, and the non-EDU version, but when it comes to simple robot programming, those make very little difference.

I'd suggest you play around with it a bit, and just try to understand everything. Then, you'll better understand what questions you have.

Steve

Thanks for your reply

asiajason wrote:Hi, our school has just purchased the Lego Mindstorms educational robotics platform, and the robot part is 9797.

The CD that came with it doesn't install on Mac, so after some searching, I found a patch, for Snow Leopard and above, but it too, doesn't work.

Another teacher has found an .iso somewhere online that seems to be much more up to date... it installs V 2.0.f5. However, the word "Edu" was taken out of the App Folder name. Is that a problem?

Also, it seems there are patches on other lego sites (not mindstorms), that look like they go with this version, and update it even further... the patch is labeled "2.1.f5" which to me looks more recent than 2.0.f5.

Is this correct? What version should we be at? Can you point to the link for the latest versions? And I need to start programming this robot, and am overwhelmed by the different sites and methods of programming I see for this thing. Should I use the Visual method, Assembly method, BCC method, etc? A brief guiding helping hand pointing me in the right direction would be hugely appreciated!

Thanks,
Jason

You didn't mention which version your school has, but the updaters only work on the same major version. i.e,. if you have 2.0, then you can only update to 2.0f5, not 2.1f5, for example. Unfortunately LEGO had an older updater which changed the version number from 2.0 to 2.1 (It was probably meant to be 2.01). I found that it is not possible to apply any newer updates if you had applied that broken version previously.

The best bet is to find the latest version from the LEGO website, and apply it directly to the version which came on the CD.
Getting it to install on Snow Leopard and Lion is a bit tricky. You would need to follow some guides on modifying one of the package files before executing the installer program.

Another caveat is that the NXT-G software doesn't like the most recent versions of Flash for Mac OS X. So you might find that after installing the software, the help and description within NXT-G won't work or crash the program. You would need to decide whether it is worth the security risk of running obsolete versions of Flash.

I don't use NXT-G on a regular basis so I probably got some of the details such as version numbers wrong.