Hello, I am a tech intern in a school district setting up robotc for a robotics class and everything has been going smoothly until we hit the wall of connecting the cortex to the computer via usb. We found that we could only download the firmware and compile the program to it if students have administrator rights, if we have them in any other windows group, Power users, for example. Robotc will say there is nothing connected but under the Administrators group it will work. But for security reasons we are against giving them these rights. Is robotc required to work only if users have admin rights or is there another solution?

Any help would be appriciated

Os: windows 7
PC: Dell Optiplex 745
RobotC for cortex and pic version 2.32

You do not need administrative rights to run ROBOTC. The issue seems to be the permissions surrounding the drivers/devices in the non-administrative user groups, which is set in Windows. These specific settings can usually be "relaxed" without giving the students full admin access.

Also, ROBOTC 3.0 is a free upgrade if you already have a license for ROBOTC for Cortex 2.32. ROBOTC 3.0 includes a new Master Firmware from VEX Robotics that allows Windows to identify the Cortex as a specific device, rather than a generic one. You might try upgrading to see if that helps. You can download the latest version of the software AND the necessary drivers here: http://www.robotc.net/download/nxt/

Updated instructions for this version can be found here: http://www.robotc.net/files/3.x/Getting ... %20VEX.htm