Why not take advantage of LabVIEW's "inherently-parallel" nature? The Producer/Consumer pattern is ideal for a Queue-driven State Machine, with the Producer being the Event Loop which sits there, waiting for an Event, and when one comes (as the result of a Button Push), puts the corresponding State on the Queue and hands it to the Consumer Loop, the State Machine (with no more need for an Idle State, unless you truly want to do some Idle processing such as creating a pleasing display with Front Panel Indicator lights). You can learn more about the Producer/Consumer pattern by creating a new VI from the Producer/Consumer Template (File, New ... (the three dots are important!), From Template, Frameworks, Design Patterns, Producer/Consumer Design Pattern (Events)).
Bob Schor
