Question about producer consumer architecture on CLD prep material

[galliuminecuador]

The guidelines for the problem are attached (.pdf). After reviewing the solution(CLD 11 Producer consumer events solution.vi) I notice the solution creator used a "check time" state in the state machine and queue subvi routine to handle the states. I wanted to know why the author of this solution saw it necessary to use these steps to solve the problem. Attached is a solution I created (Step_Sequencer_with_Elapsed_Time_Express_VI_Timer_001.vi) Albeit my solution doesn't read in .csv data, it is virtually identical in function.

I was hoping someone could provide me a comparison of the strength and weaknesses of the two architectures. Thank you very much for your help!

[BrinkHombre]

Hey galliuminecuador,

Could you clarify which two architectures you are trying to compare?

• Producer/Consumer Events architecture (CLD 11 solution) versus a State Machine with a while loop (CLD 9 solution)
• Producer/Consumer Events architecture (CLD 11 solution) versus a "State Machine with an event structure in the same while loop" (your solution)

Best regards,

[BrinkHombre]

Hey galliuminecuador,

Here are two articles that explain more about each of the first two architectures I mentioned. Some potential issues and solutions related to each architecture can be seen in the Important Notes section at the bottom of the articles. 

• Application Design Patterns: State Machines
• Application Design Patterns: Producer/Consumer

As the articles suggest, while State Machines can provide great decision-making algorithms and application planning, code redundancy and scalability of the project can become an issue for some programmers. Implementing an event structure in the Producer/Consumer architecture has the advantage of providing synchronization to the application, however handling data types in queues can still introduce some difficulty to programmers.