Need some help with the basics

[ATH4]

so, my issue is that i cannot seem to figure out how to control a motor.

my motor is the electric motor from the mod "Create Crafts & additions".
this motor does support being controlled by a computercraft computer. (documentation here: ) )

my program is suppoed to check if a redstone wire connected to the computer's left side is turned on
if it is, then set the motor's(which is placed on top of the computer) speed to 256
and if its not on, set the speed to 0

according to my own googling, this should be fairly simple, but i could never get it to work, the usual errors about expecting end or = near something.

my code looks like this:
while true do
if redstone.getInput("Left") = 1 then
motor = peripheral.wrap("left")
motor.setSpeed(256)
else
motor.stop
end

help would be really appriciated

[fatboychummy]

while true do
  if redstone.getInput("Left") = 1 then
    motor = peripheral.wrap("left")
    motor.setSpeed(256)
  else
    motor.stop
  end

motor.stop is missing (), so lua thinks you are trying to assign something to motor.stop but forgot to actually do = something

motor.stop() is what you want.

Also, you need one more end.

[ATH4]

Tried both applying the fixes myself and just pasting your finished code in.
both returned " test.lua:4: 'then' expacted near '=' "

[fatboychummy]

Ah, missed another one. You need to use == rather than =.

= sets values, == compares values.

You will probably want to do == true instead, or just remove the == part entirely, ie:

if redstone.getInput("left") then

Since redstone.getInput returns a boolean value, you don't need a comparison. if x then is pretty much equal to if x == true then

[ATH4]

appiled the fix, now it returns " test.lua:5: attempt to index local motor (a nil value) "

[fatboychummy]

Is the motor on the left side?

[ATH4]

IT WORKS! thank you so much.
after looking at the code i noticed it as looking for a redstone signal from the same side the motor was on, changed that to right and bam, it worked as intended