After yesterday post I received two precious hints from Laurens Valk and David Lechner that finally allowed me to upgrade the firmware of my EV3.
When changing to firmware upgrade mode, the EV3 changes its USB device ID (that’s why it appears as disconnected in the EV3 tool). So we just need to add a new USB filter rule in the VM settings:
0694:0006 "LEGO EV3 Firmware Update"
The original filter, for normal operating mode, is
0694:0005 "LEGO Group EV3"
And of course I made a video showing how to do it:
Yesterday Marc-André Bazergui incentivized me to make a video showing how to use LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Software inside a virtual machine. It is a shame that a product running Linux inside can only be used on PC or Mac – and that’s one of the reasons I started using ev3dev as I only have linux systems (laptops, Raspberry Pi’s, old DIY desktops without a Windows license…).
I got my first EV3 exactly 3 years ago as a birthday gift from my wife. I don’t remember if I ever installed the Windows software on a VM before – I did installed one or twice in Ubuntu with Wine (not sure why) and I did installed a Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio in a VMware Workstation virtual machine and do remember having connected it to the the EV3 thorough a bluetooth USB dongle (most modern hypervisors have this nice feature to allow a local device on the host to be passed-through into the guest).
I no longer have VMware Workstation but I have used Innotek VirtualBox in the past and knew that Oracle somehow managed to keep it alive after buying it (Oracle has the morbid habit of poisoning every good thing it owns – Java, Solaris, OpenOffice, MySQL…).
So I installed Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.1.4 (there is even a x64 .deb package for Ubuntu 16.04 “Xenial”) and after that the VirtualBox 5.1.4 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack.
It was quite easy and also very fast. After that I got a licensed version of Microsoft Windows 8 Professional (x64 also) – this is my work laptop so people immediatlely started making fun of me – hey, he is installing Windows on his laptop, finally!
The rest of the process was also quite easy after all – like I thought, it is possible to use a Bluetooth USB dongle and also just the direct USB cable connection:
create a Virtual Machine
make sure “Enable USB Controller” is checked and USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller is selected – it might also work with USB 3.0
add an USB Device Filter for each USB device you want to passthrough into the VM (the EV3 itself and/or the Bluetooth dongle)
install Windows
present VirtualBox Guest Additions CD Image and install
define a Shared Folder so you can pass drivers and binaries into the VM
if the Bluetooth dongle is not automatic configured, install the proper drivers
pair the EV3 (or plug the USB cable)
install LEGO Mindstorms EV3 software and run it
I made a video showing every step (just skipped the LEGO Software as it’s pretty straightfoward):
Just one note: although USB cable connection seems to work fine, i tried to upgrade my EV3 firmware several times with no success – every single time it hangs at 0%. Perhaps it behaves better with another Windows version… who knows?
I got a request for help today, Mr. Rocha is trying to use MIT App Inventor to control the WeDo 2.0 Smart Hub RGB LED.
I’ve never used App Inventor before but I had already installed the Companion once in my Android Phone because I read something somewhere and found it quite similar to Snap! and Scratch (and also just because it is from MIT… I have a fetiche for MIT back from when I was at college and read Nicholas Negroponte articles on Wired). So let’s give it a try.
I just wanted to connect to the WeDo 2.0 Smart Hub and change the color to RED. When using gatttool that’s done with just
char-write-cmd 3d 06040109
Just needed to add the BLE extension to start working, getting a connection was easy but writing to the handle took a while since App Inventor BLE extension doesn’t use handles, just UUIDs. So I had to go back to my notes and find the Service UUID and the Characteristic UUID:
Then I tried a block called “call BluetoothLE. WriteStringValue” but I couldn’t find a way to convert an hexadecimal string (“06040109”) to a proper string to send.
So I tried another block, “call BluetoothLE.WriteIntValue”. At first I made an old mistake, converting “06040109h” to “100925705”. Didn’t work.
Then I wrote it in reverse (“09010406h”) and converted it to “151061510”. And now it works!
Now that I finally started, I think I will use App Inventor some more times. Damn easy to create an BLE Android app!
