controlling and syncing multiple statemachines

[dbrittain]

Hello, I am new here. I am having a difficulty setting up a application. I have three vi's I am running to do some data acquisition, stage control and processing respectively. One of the vis is running on a 64bit labview platform. The other two are running on a 32bit platform. They all internally are statemachines, but I would like to design I way to activate certain states based on states from other vis.

 

For example here is what I am trying to do, below is a diagram of the internal states and how I would like them to communicate:

 

vi_A: 'Idle'->Do_SomethingA_1    -> Switch_vi_B_to_Do_Something_B_2 ->...

vi_B: 'Idle'->Do_Something_B_1  -> Wait_for: Switch_vi_B_to_Do_Something_B_2 -> Do_Something_B_2 ->...

vi_C: 'Idle'->Do_Something_C_1 -> ...

[MikaelH]

Are the 3 VIs running on 3 different computers and you like to synchronize them?

I would use one master VI/state machine, which sends simple requests to the three server-VIs.

The Server VIs would create a TCP-listener and wait for commands and execute them.

[egraham]

JKI has a presentation on how to do this using their state machine and user events. It's a convenient and simple way to expand on an already very useful architecture. You'll find the JKI state machine gets used a lot in the LabVIEW community.

 

Check it out here:

http://blog.jki.net/events/niweek-2011-beyond-state-machines-slides-and-code-now-available/

[dbrittain]

Sorry if I was not clear. All of the vi's for now run on the same machine. The problem is that I need to control the states of all three vi's based on what states they are in respective to each other, one waits for a 'trigger' from another vi inorder to progress. I have two vis in a 32bit version of labview and a vi running in 64bit labview.

 

I just installed JKI I will take a look. I am not sure what differentiates it from a standard state-machine although I know it must be more robust. 

[egraham]

The difference is that you now have a way to have multiple processes (state machines) running simultaneously and communicating with each other. In that example, events are the communication mechanism.

[OlivierL]

I was just reading this topic and realized the suggestion to use Notifiers across LabVIEW instances (they have to be different instances between 64bits and 32 bits).  I never ran into a situation requiring this personally but does this mean that Notifiers (named) (and possibly Queues (named)) allow communication between LabVIEW instances?

 

I looked at the Help file and under Notifier, it says:

"Note If you obtain a notifier reference in one application instance, you cannot use that notifier reference in another application instance. If you attempt to use a notifier reference in another application instance, LabVIEW returns error 1492."

 

Doesn't this imply that it is not possible?

 

There might be something more fundamental I don't understand in this issue since I thought it was not possible to install and run both 32 and 64 bits on the same PC...

[Yair]

Doesn't this imply that it is not possible?

 

Yes, it does. You can't use them across instance boundaries.

[OlivierL]

Therefore, my recommendation for drbrittain would be to use the TCP/UDP communication method.  I personally use the AMC (http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/epd/p/id/6091) library from NI a lot within a single LabVIEW instance but there are VIs in there to communicate seamlessly accross different machines over UDP I believe.  You will need to tweak the code wherever "AMC_UPD port.vi" is called to use two different ports since you are on the same IP address.

 

Otherwise, I just did a quick test with Shared variables and they successfully communicate accross LabVIEW instances (2009-2011) and should also work between 32 and 64 bits.  You can use a few variables to allow each process to know what the other processes are currently doing.  You can even use those as queues if you configure them as FIFOs. (http://www.ni.com/white-paper/4679/en)