Trial #8: Lego Mindstorm & WeDo

Problem

Create a Silent Installer for Mindstorm EV3 Edu & WeDo. These packages seem to contain development platforms, drivers and configuration upload utilities for two classes of Lego Controllers.

Mindstorm was so easy it’s not worth mentioning but WeDo provided a couple of challenges

Solution

Mindstorm installs simply using the following command as per installer docs.

LME-EV3-WIN32-ENGB-01-02-02-full-setup.exe /q /AcceptLicenses yes

WeDo is a little harder. If fails when using the following

WeDo2-Full-Win7-GLOBAL-1-3-23.exe /verysilent /norestart

I found that this was because the main installer triggers another driver installer that throws two UAC confirmation boxes.

I unpacked the main installer using innounp and within the extracted files found the following driver installers:

.{app}\driver

I cached this directory along with the main installer and deleted the rest

I found that if I installed these drivers first prior to the main installer it completes successfully.

The drivers can be installed silently using the following as documented in the dpinst64.exe /? description

dpinst64.exe /Q

That’s great, a two line batch file will suffice to install this in a few mins per machine. Don’t forget the norestart switch or it will restart every machine post install. I have a suspicion this may simply delay a restart but that is circumstantial.

#Pitfalls Post installation the two applications require some local firewall rules.

At the moment I have simply run the applications as admin and select yes when prompted on a few selected machines.

The following rules are then created and could be deployed by group policy or perhaps by powershell if they are widely required

Name	Group	Profile	Enabled	Action	Override	Program	Local Address	Remote Address	Protocol	Local Port	Remote	Port	Allowed Users	Allowed Computers
LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3	All	Yes	Allow	No	C:\Program Files (x86)\LEGO Software\LEGO MINDSTORMS Edu EV3\MindstormsEV3.exe	Any	Any	UDP	Any	Any	Any	Any
LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3	Domain	Yes	Allow	No	C:\Program Files (x86)\LEGO Software\LEGO MINDSTORMS Edu EV3\MindstormsEV3.exe	Any	Any	UDP	Any	Any	Any	Any
LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3	Domain	Yes	Allow	No	C:\Program Files (x86)\LEGO Software\LEGO MINDSTORMS Edu EV3\MindstormsEV3.exe	Any	Any	TCP	Any	Any	Any	Any
LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3	All	Yes	Allow	No	C:\Program Files (x86)\LEGO Software\LEGO MINDSTORMS Edu EV3\MindstormsEV3.exe	Any	Any	TCP	Any	Any	Any	Any
WeDo 2.0	Domain	Yes	Allow	No	C:\program files (x86)\wedo 2.0\wedo 2.0.exe	Any	Any	UDP	Any	Any	Any	Any
WeDo 2.0 EV3	Domain	Yes	Allow	No	C:\program files (x86)\wedo 2.0\wedo 2.0.exe	Any	Any	TCP	Any	Any	Any	Any