Hi Mike,
The wait function will only pause VI execution if it is in series with a portion of the VI. If you look at the attached VI, "Waits in Parallel.vi", you can see that the two loops act independent of each other with seperate loop times because the waits are not dependent on each other. Also, the loop that contains a series of waits executes at the speed of the longest wait, but the booleans can toggle at the same time the loop is "waiting" because the wait and the toggling are parallel.
In the first Intervalometer example, if you had additional code inside of that while loop, that code would appear to wait on the "wait" fuction because that code is only executed once per wait. Alternatively, you could take a look at the "Intervalometer2.vi" attached to see how the code could be modified to execute a nested loop at a faster rate. That nexted loop could operate your switch matrix. Another alternative would be that you could add a parallel loop to handle that switching at a faster rate.
In summary, Wait(ms) does not inherently pause execution of an entire VI. LabVIEW uses the data flow model to determine when each node will execute (a node executes when all of it's inputs are available). When using a Wait function in a loop, generally, that function operates in parallel with the rest of the code in the loop, but the wait is the "slowest" part of the code so it dictates the loop rate. You can use frames and Wait to dictate a pause between fuctions because a frame will wait for all code in the frame to execute before it. I think the Waits in Parallel VI attached demonstrates this idea.
Cheers,
Spex
National Instruments
To the pessimist, the glass is half empty; to the optimist, the glass is half full; to the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be has a 2x safety factor...
