For my tests, I need to launch several ancillary VIs that manage, among other things, CAN messaging and timing concerns. These VIs must be active to stimulate the UUT for relevant measurements. These elaborate stimulation VIs are actually subsystem simulators - synchronous state machines to be general - not by any measure passive objects. Precision timing and communication are fundamentally used to drive these routines.
As I am learning TestStand, it is not clear to me how to interact with or control a VI while it is active in a sequence execution thread. (Reading page 3-12 of the LabView with TestStand manual, it doesn't even appear possible). It is imperative that these stimulation VIs are launched and the main sequence can then carry on with the actual assessment, while still being able to interact with the stimulation routines. I've gotten far enough to be able to implement a VI and then return to the main sequence after implementing other threads, but I do not know how to pass information to or from these other VIs. Global variables only seem to be available in the TestStand variable space...exclusive from what the LabVIEW engine sees...is this true?
We were on the road to develop our own "test executive" (which we actually recognize more or less as a system simulator because our UUTs are only smaller components of a much larger system, so we simulate parts of the rest of the system to interact with the UUT), but we were strongly encouraged that TestStand could accomplish these things for us. So I'm trying to develop some tests on it to see if it's the thing.
any comment would be greatly appreciated.
james k