Some notes by Randy Forgaard

RoboLab is one of the programming languages available for Lego Mindstorms, the terrific robotics Lego kit.  Of the more than one thousand teams of First Lego League (FLL), the worldwide Lego robotics competition for 5th through 8th grade students, probably more use RoboLab as their programming language than any other.  On this page, I will gather various useful bits of information about RoboLab that our FLL team has discovered, might not be obvious in the various RoboLab information resources.

All of the notes below are for RoboLab v2.5.2.

Can't Get to the Pointer or Wire Tool

On some of the computers we use for RoboLab, both on Windows XP and Macintosh, we found that we could not get to the all important Pointer tool or Wire tool.  Normally you can get to these by pressing the space bar to switch between them, or by choosing these tools from the Tools Palette, but we could not get this to work on some of our computers.  These are the most basic tools in RoboLab, allowing you move function blocks and wire them together.  The fact that we couldn't get to these two tools made RoboLab useless on those computers.  It is as if RoboLab is stuck in Debug mode, rather than Edit mode.  The fix for this, which we discovered with the generous and expert help of Skye Sweeney, is as follows:

• Open any RoboLab program.  It can be one of the programs that come with RoboLab, or one of your own.

• On the File menu, choose "New VI."  This brings up a new, almost empty  RoboLab program.

• Click on the window for the first RoboLab program you opened, to bring that window to the front.

• On the File menu, choose "Close."  This closes the original RoboLab program, and just leaves the new, almost empty RoboLab program displayed.

• Press the space bar several times.  You should now find that you can use the Pointer tool and Wire tool, and all is back to normal.

• Go to the File menu, and choose "Save As..." to save this empty program under a name you will remember, like "Empty."

• Close RoboLab.

• The next time you start RoboLab, open the "Empty" program first.  You should find that the tools work correctly, and everything is back to normal.

Unfortunately, the above fix only helps you with new RoboLab programs that you write.  If you open an existing RoboLab program (like one of the sample programs that ships with RoboLab), the bug can still be there, because this bug is somehow "saved" with the program.  We do not yet know the solution for old programs, but at least you should be able to write new RoboLab programs with no further difficulties.