[foobert]

take it from that last guy. he works for innovation first.

i tried to build my own programmer, with a pushbutton, a max232, and a handful of capacitors, but wound up ordering a prototype programmer from ifi. when i got it and saw that it included its own little pic i realized the folly of my ways.

anyway, with the programmer in hand and after a little perusal of the sample code it's pretty easy to get the vex kit to do your bidding. also questions can be posted to the forums at vexlabs.com and are usually answered in a timely fashion.