Lego Mindstorms

Thought I'd post this for any of you running Lego MindStorms NXT on your network. 

An issue that has cropped up for us has been the save location of the 'MyBlocks' components. Although MindStorms allows you to save the project files wherever you like (our students put them in their home drives), the 'MyBlocks' components don't provide a traditional save as dialog box. After a bit of digging we worked out that they are saved to "C:\documents and settings\%username%\My Documents\Lego Creations\Mindstorms Projects\Profiles\Default\Blocks" which for us (and I'm sure most networks) is a problem. Students have no access to C: and the profiles are deleted on logoff, so our students would work on a PC, create and save a project, then add some MyBlocks. On logging on to another machine, the project would open, but the MyBlocks would be missing.

To get around this we did the following:

- grabbed a copy of the 'settings.ini' file from "C:\documents and settings\%username%\My Documents\Lego Creations\Mindstorms Projects\Profiles\Default\

- edited this file and changed the "Data Directory=/C/...." to "Data Directory=/H/"

- copied this up to a public share

- created a script that xcopies this file to "C:\documents and settings\%username%\My Documents\Lego Creations\Mindstorms Projects\Profiles\Default\" then starts the Mindstorms program

- Edited the desktop shortcut on the student machines to run this script instead of running Mindstorms directly

So the student runs the shortcut, xcopy copies the ini file, then Mindstorms runs (hardly any delay really). When they save a MyBlock now, it goes into their Home drive so it now becomes portable across the network

If anyone knows an alterantive or better way, please comment