Phantom - The Spirit.ocx Replacement

History

Mindstorms 1.0

When Lego® released the Mindstorm 1.0 Robotics Invention System (RIS), it included an ActiveX control named Spirit.ocx. This control facilitated communications between the Lego® Mindstorm software and the RCX via an Infrared Tower connected to a serial port on the host computer. Since this control included a typelib, it was not long before people discovered that you could program and/or control the RCX from VB. Lego® then released a Software Development Kit (SDK) that documented the Spirit.ocx and provided a small example VB program. 

Download the Lego® MINDSTORMS SDK 1.0.

Mindstorms 2.0

The Mindstorms 2.0 RIS provided many improvements over the Mindstorms 1.0 RIS, but the four that interest us are:

• USB Infrared Tower.
• New COM interface (Ghost.dll) for communicating with the RCX.
• New firmware for the RCX with new functionality.
• A new Software Development Kit.

Download the Lego® MINDSTORMS SDK 2.0

Backward Compatibility Problems

The new firmware is backward compatible with the 1.0 RIS and Spirit.ocx, but the USB IR Tower is not. If you have written a VB program that uses the Spirit.ocx control, you cannot use the USB IR tower without rewriting a large part of your program to use the new Ghost.dll interface.

A Solution

Phantom is a replacement for the Spirit.ocx control.

The goals for this project are to:

1. Create a replacement for the Spirit.ocx that supports the USB IR Tower. The user should be able to delete the Spirit.ocx control from his VB form, add the Phantom control in its place, give the control the same name as the deleted Spirit.ocx control, and Run.
2. Download all version of the firmware to the RCX. The latest firmware cannot be downloaded to the RCX via the Spirit.ocx control even when using the serial port IR tower.
3. Make an "Open Source" contribution to the Lego® Mindstorms user community.
4. Add support for the new functionality provided by latest firmware version.

With this release, the first 3 goals have been met.

Downloads

Phantom 1.0 RC4: Phtm10RC5.zip

Phantom 1.0 RC4 Source: Phtm10RC5s.zip

Support

If you find the program usefull and would like to contribute to its continuing development, feel free to make a donation.