Install and setup Robocorp Lab
To build, test, and run your robot, you decide to use Robocorp Lab, because you heard that it offers everything you need to create software robots in one simple package, using human-readable syntax. It's a full Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and free to use!
It will also be easy to integrate with Robocorp Cloud, allowing you to execute the robot completely in the cloud! And get email notifications! Create workspaces with your future colleagues! Execute the same robot in a mix of cloud containers, physical machines, and self-hosted servers!
All this sounds really good, but you are getting a bit ahead of yourself. Let's concentrate on getting up and running.
Setup Robocorp Lab and your Robocorp Cloud account
Time for some setup work! You will need to register for Robocorp Cloud, install Robocorp Lab, and link it to your Robocorp Cloud account.
- Sign up for a Robocorp account and follow the instructions.
- Download and install Robocorp Lab for your Operating System.
- Link Robocorp Lab to your Robocorp account.
Done? Great!
Open Robocorp Lab and download the starter files for the course
Robocorp Lab comes with useful example robots that you can download from within the application, including all you need to work on your robot in this course.
When creating a complex robot, it's useful to break down what it does in multiple steps. Different steps can be run in different environments. For example, getting some data from an external system could be done by an instance running in the cloud, and working on a Windows program can be done by a physical machine running Robocorp App. Anyway, you don't need to worry about this for now. Our robot will be simple enough to fit all in one robot.
- Open Robocorp Lab and download the example robots
- Open the
robotsparebin-starterrobot from the list on the right.
Once the robot is open, you will see this:
Great! Now we are ready to start building!