I am creating a subVI state machine (case structure) which will run inside a while loop which will be executing every 250ms. The reason I wanted to make the state machine case structure into a subVI is because I want to execute 64 of the machines within the same loop. The goal is to monitor certain types of voltage changes on 64 I/O channels on a FP2200 RT module and report periodic details about state changes to a database. My thinking was that by executing each independent machine in the same loop structure, I will only worry about one thread. It seems that the alternative of having one state machine thread per I/O channel is probably more than the RT module can handle. Please correct me if I am wrong on that.
The issue I'm now having is as I'm creating the state machine, I am finding that I need to keep track of some pieces of data from one loop iteration to the next. This is easy enough to do with shift registers but in order to use them, I have to create additional input nodes to my SubVI as well as output nodes. For example, I want to use a queue to buffer some I/O data but as of now, I have to create this queue outside the loop, pull it into the loop across a shift register, feed it to the subVI, and output it to the out Shift register. It would be better if I didn't have to output this queue because there's no reason for anything to have access to it outside the subVI. It just creates an extra set of wires to look at and makes me worry a bit about maintainability.
Is there a better way to approach this problem?
