I am many days of time into this changeover now with a lot of reading, watching videos (and falling asleep during them LOL), and hands on trial and error.
I already have my machine running now......except the stuff that does require learning Lua, updating some parts, and the Mach4 programming structure (Aux functions, toolchanger, etc). I do have the manual button, indicator, and M codes setup for the oiler and working (except turning off when disabled). I figured I would do those before tackling the automatic oiler stuff.
I have already learned a lot, but still have a long way to go. The one thing I am dreading is the tool change most. My old VB script is so easy to understand and follow. I had not looked at it in years, but opened it today, and it makes perfect sense and is darn near plain English the whole way through compared to Lua.
What I meant by the search not working, is that if you go into the API help file, search for some text so you can look up what something is.....it returns nothing sometimes. If you manually dig and search for it, it is in there. This is not really a "being lazy" thing. You would just expect the search tool to find you what you need so you can spend the time reading about it without scrolling through everything trying to find if it is there. This is the great thing about it not being a paperback book vs an electronic text file!
The important part is alphabetical at least, that helps some.
Thanks for the Lua manual link. I found a PDF version that will be easier to search if anyone reads this and wants it that way....
https://jackens.github.io/downloads/Lua-5-3-Reference-Manual.pdfI will check out your SignalScript.pdf. Thanks for the link.
I will likely discover this as I read and research more, but I am going to ask anyway...
What is the mc. for? Is this a way of calling out the custom API commands that are only for Mach? Is "mc" an abreviation for something unique to mach4?
Also in the Lua Manual. Many things starts with "LUA_" but I do not see that in any coding for Mach so far? Is that just dropped from the commands or a placeholder for something else?