I’ve got a friend who is trying to set up programming on Linux. We’ll be using PROS, so the programming environment is a non-issue. I’m also willing to update firmware on my Windows machine, so having the Firmware Upgrade Utility is not necessary (but would be nice to have).
However, he does need drivers for the Cortex. I saw that the Serial → Joystick → USB → Cortex method is supposed to work without any drivers, but is there an unofficial method of getting drivers to work on Linux? What are your experiences with programming on Linux?
As of right now, there is not. JPearman hacked one together for Mac and I imagine the same could be done for Linux if someone here had experience writing Linux drivers.
I just used the programming kit. Spending 50$ was way less effort than learning how to write a driver. It let me keep my OS, and the wireless use is a true godsend. So much easier than repeatedly unplugging the VEXnet key.
I’m not a fan of wireless downloading because it wears the keys out much quicker which makes them prone to failure, at which point you’ll have to unplug anyway. I have serial programming kit, but was hoping somebody might have a mashed together driver.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence of that; key failures are mostly hardware related AFAIK which to me would imply that wireless downloading is better because you don’t keep unplugging the keys and wearing out the plug.
I mean, if you really would rather use a wired connection, you could use the serial programming kit to a joystick and then a USB cable from the Joystick to the Cortex. We’d do that sometimes just to speed up the upload or if the wireless keys were giving us issues and we didn’t really feel like figuring out the issue.