Don's snippet should do what you want. The problem with your VI is you were using the wrong function.
Scan from string takes a string of characters that make up a human readable number and converts them to a number. So if your screen consisted of a "0" and a "1" (in normal display), it would have worked. Instead you had a single byte of ASCII value 01, which is a control code in the ASCII chart and not a numeric digit.
