I’m helping run a robotics summer camp, we are using the old VEX PIC controllers and EasyC programming software (though we have tried downloading from RobotC). Whenever we try downloading, we get an error claiming the the Serial port is not plugged in/the robot is not on, while both are clearly functional. I am running Win8 and (as far as I know) have downloaded all necessary firmware for downloading. Any ideas?
You probably need to update drivers for the USB - Serial cable. Are you using the new or old serial cable? http://intelitekdownloads.com/easyCV2/images/Programmer.gif
Drivers for both cables can be found here
Right, so we were using the old cables, but it turns out that wasn’t the problem. We later identified that Win8 and the newest version of the serial cable driver. The newest version had a counterfeit item checker that thought the PIC bot was an illegal object, blocking our download. So, we downgraded to the 3.0.00 version of the serial cable driver (without that checker).
Great troubleshooting. I’ll forward this to our tech support department for future issues. thanks for the feedback.