How do people design state machines before implementing in Labview?

[david.ball]

Currently I design my state machines in Visio before implementing in LabVIEW as this way I can review the code with none LV people before I build the code.

Viso works well for small state machines, but now I am moving onto larger ones with Superstates and many sub states I am finding Visio to be not ideal for the job. I want to be able to double click a superstate and open in a new window exactly like stateflow does in Simulink. 

Also I want an output of all states and transitions in table form for later validation of my coding.

Is there any free software out there that can do this for me?

[AmyNK]

Hi LegoHead,

I have just spoken with a few of the guys from our Systems Engineering team, to see if they recommended a software, but infortunately they, like you, found the caveats of designing large state machines in software, and prefer to "do it in their heads"! Sadly it is one software which NI have not created as of yet.

If you google "state machine designer", a few free software results show up, but I'm unsure of how much of what you'd like it to do, that it will do - your best bet would be to explore them.

Hopefully someone in the community will see this soon and have a great idea of a software to use!

Amy

[Yamaeda]

In WhiteStarUML (and probably the others) you can organize stuff as Packages. A Package in this case would be the sub diagram, but how automatic you can get it i don't know.

/Y

[RTSLVU]

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@AmyNK wrote:

Hi LegoHead,

I have just spoken with a few of the guys from our Systems Engineering team, to see if they recommended a software, but infortunately they, like you, found the caveats of designing large state machines in software, and prefer to "do it in their heads"! Sadly it is one software which NI have not created as of yet.

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State machine diagrams and flow charts are not meant to be a line by line representation of your code, but a "general framework" of how the program works.

[Ben]

Did you look at teh LabVIEW State Diagram Editor?

See here.

Ben

[Ben]

Adding to my previous...

See the attachements in this thread.

This post may also be of interest.

Ben

[Daikataro]

Personally, I prefer to "do it in my head" as well, but when customers or fellow programmers ask for a general diagram, I tend to use SmartDraw to produce a quick sketch or even a somewhat more detailed solution.