It never occurred to me that they did not implement Atan in Mach3 scripts since it is a standard VB function. There is a simple work around though using what are known as the Taylor Series for trig functions so the solution for finding the angle in degrees is:
slope=Zdifference/20
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?Angle = 180*(slope-(slope^3)/3+(slope^5)/5-(slope^7)/7+(slope^9)/9)/3.14159
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This is good to about 7 decimal places for angles below 20¡ã so should be good enough for your needs. Once again I have not tried implementing it in Mach3 but it should work as it is using simple multiplication and division that I know works. If the exponent ^ does not work then just use slope*slope*slope for slope^3 etc. Based on what you did previously you should recognise the 180 and the 3.142589 for converting radians to degrees.
If you want better accuracy beyond 20¡ã you just need to add more terms to the series increasing the exponent by 2 each time and alternating + and - . There is an issue of diminishing returns as you increase the angle, You need far more terms to get reasonable accuracy up to 35¡ã for example. When you get as far as -(slope^15)/15 you are down to an accuracy of 2 decimal places for the angle 35¡ã, one decimal place at about 38¡ã.
