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?
Edit: Laurens Valk and David Lechner know. So I made a second post showing how to upgrade the firmware.