Good practice with clusters

[Karlito]

Hallo All,

I have one perhaps silly question. If I have numerous controls on my front panel. Is it better to use one cluster for all user inputs and use decorations to make it more intuitive or is it ok to use one big cluster which contains another clusters (i.e., cluster for VISA settings, for timing error in etc.) ? I have not found anywhere if the cluster of clusters can perahps be more demanding on memory or CPU. Thank you for any suggestions.

Yours Sincerely Karel

[crossrulz]

The point of clusters is to keep things that are related to each other together.  So you VISA settings for a power supply would be good canidate for a cluster.  If things are not really related, it is best to not bundle them from a logic point of view.

Based on your quick description, it sounds like it would be best to have several clusters, which each cluster containing related data.

[Karlito]

Thank you for comment. Well the real point why I would like to have all controls in one cluster or a cluster of clusters is that the coding is more readable and I do not need to have hundreds of shift registers in the state machine. Just one for inputs and one for outputs. Is that a bad habbit ? That is basically why I want to use this approach.

[crossrulz]

I'm not seeing why you would need so many shift registers.  Why would you keep inputs in shift registers?  It sounds like something is wrong with your architecture

[Karlito]

Well perhaps on the inputs side it may be questionable but on the outputs where you refresh results etc. it I assume makes sense use shift registers for passing data. And since the number values being refreshed is not that small (10 to 20) I do not want to clutter the diagram. But in essence what I do not know is the initial question, whether a cluster of clusters either controls or indicators is in any way worse than one cluster with all controls indicators in it.