Okay, I took the sage advice of johnsold and spend a week looking into state diagrams and working through some the issues that I would inherently run into with this project. I came up with a flow chart of what I want my program to do. I attached it below.
As a refresher, this program is to use a lift to move up to 3 different barrels at a time around to soak in one-barrel-at-a-time tanks for a particular length of time. There are only 5 different tank sequences that these barrels can take on and 1 barrel must be started with the option of starting a second and then a third barrel after the other barrel(s) are running through their sequence.
The big struggle I had was ensuring that the lift did not drop a barrel into a tank that already was occupied. I solved this in my flow chart through the use of semaphores, but realistically the odds of the lift dropping a barrel into an already occupied tank is really low since the soaking times are very similar and they occur in a similar order, with 10 minutes or so at least being between barrel launches. Still, a limit of 3 barrels at a time will be imposed.
So anyways, I attached the flowchart I created. If anyone would be so kind, look it over and see if my logic makes sense. I need to add in an abort button, but left it off to help simplify the chart. Does this flowchart look like something to use a state machine for or is it too complicated for a beginning to code as a state machine?
-- Matt (Who is getting married this Saturday!)
Edit: Minor corrections to sentence structure and attached image as .jpg instead of .gif
Message Edited by LabViewNubie on 03-01-2007 03:34 PM
