Well, the simple stuff in LabVIEW I can do, but I'm still struggling to get my head around the concept of "Events" and how LabVIEW handles them. If I only have one type of event (i.e., pushing a button out of several on the UI, or reading a serial input and handling it programatically), I think I'm good. But my application requires me to be able to handle either of these at the front panel.
Going through the LV Knowledgebase got me this link (it's a little old - LV8.6, but seemed to handle the basics), from which I downloaded "events.vi" (attached). My situation is a little different, so I modified it a bit to "EventExperiment.vi" (also attached) to have a bare-bones template I could use for my application. If I run it as shown, it seems to run fine (with a serial input, the "1" and "2" lights turn off, but the Bytes at Serial Input indicator always shows "0" and the "Serial Indicator" light never lights - I am assuming that these change and revert too quickly to see in the UI). My concerns with my VI are:
If you add a short delay in the processing of the serial input event (say 1 second delay in that event case, or even a 1 second delay subVI after the serial flush connected through the error line), the VI accepts no further UI input after the first serial event.
If you add an error wire through all the events subVIs (whether you merge this wire with the one going through the serial subVIs, the program just hangs up.
And, one little bothering thing is that the original "events.vi" takes three presses on the "stop" button to close. I'm figuring here that it's because of those local variables being passed between loops, but it hasn't been enough of a bother to worry about.
Your help is greatly appreciated,
Cameron