I've attached a sample VI that I just cannot figure out how to get working the way that I want. I've labeled the some sections with black-on-yellow text boxes for clarity during the description that follows in the next few sentences. Here's what I want:
1) overall -- i'm intend for this to be a subVI that will do data acquisition and write the data to a file. I want it to use a producer/consumer approach. The producer construct is the 'parallel for loop' that runs an exact number of times depending on user input (which will come from the mainVI that is not included). For now I've wired a 1-D array w/ 2 elements as a test case. During the producer loop, the data is acquired and put into a queue to be delt with in the consumer loop (for now, i just add a random number to the queue).
2) the consumer construct is the 'parallel while loop'. It will dequeue elements and write them to a file. I want this to keep running continuously and
parallel until two conditions are met.
i. the for loop has finished execution
ii. the queue is empty.
when the conditions are met, the while loop will exit, close the queue, and the subVI will finish. (and return stuff to mainVI that i can deal with on my own)
Here's the problems.
1) in the "parallel for loop" I have a flat sequence structure.. I haven't had time to incorporate some data dependency into these two sequential sections, but basically, I just care that the "inner while loop" condition is met before the data is collected and queued. I think I can do this on my own, but if you have suggestions, I'm interested.
2) I can easily get the outer for and while loops to run sequentially, but I
want them to run in parallel. My reasoning for this is that that I anticipate the two tasks taking very different amounts of time. .. basically, I want the while loop to just keep polling the queue to get everything out of it (or I suppose I could somehow use notifiers - suggestions welcome)... the thing is, this loop will probably run faster than the for loop, so just checking to see that the queue is empty will not work... I need to meet the additional condition that nothing else will be placed in the queue - and this condition is met when the for loop is complete. basically, I just can't figure out how to do this.
3) for now, I've placed a simple stop button in the 'parallel while loop', but I must be missing something fundamental here, because the stop button is totally unresponsive. i.e. - when I press it, it stays depressed, and nothing happens.
suggestions are totally welcome!
thanks,
-Z
