How to use a timer together with an event.

Question

Dear All,
Today I tried all day to accomplish someting with labview, but I didn't succeed. Perhaps you can help me.
The problem is as follows. 
I have an event structure inside a while loop. The events are all triggered by booleans. Those booleans initiate
for instance some pumps or  other apparatus. The time-out is put at 200ms and inside the time-out structure 
are some GET function (for instance to obtain the values of some balances and to do some calculations with those obtained values.
Now I would like to be able to start an experiment. This means by pressing a boolean initiate the experiment. This experiment involves 
the starting of a timer and after every 10 minutes, the obtained/calculated data (from the time-out) structure should be written to a .xls file.
I'm not able to programm this part of the program. My first problem is that I need an event (triggered by a boolean) that start a timer. This timer should run always (independant of other events) until stopped by another boolean. After every 10 minutes this timer should initiate (with a boolean?) the data writing to a .xls file.  Can this be done by resetting the timer after every writing event?
So I have multiple questions, but my main question is how to build an event which is trigger by a boolean and then initiates an overall timer.
Thanks! 
Bio

Answer 1

OK.  That worked.
You have made all the mistakes self-taught beginners with LabVIEW make, except that you apparently have a pretty good idea of what you want your program to do.
1.  LV is a dataflow language.  This means that any node which has all its inputs satisfied can run and once started any node runs to completion before another starts.  In your event case the timeout case will execute 200 ms after the loop starts (assuming the user did not push a button before that).  The Waits in the sequence frames mean it will be at least 555 ms before the timeout case completes.  200 ms later is will run again, if not other event has occurred.  Furthermore, you do not know whether the Waits will run before or after the other code in each od the sequence frames because there is no data dependency between the Waits and that other code.
2. A matter of style: It is recommended that front panels and block diagrams do not exceed one screen size.
3. Local variables violate the dataflow paradigm and are almost always unnecessary.  The WIRE is the variable.  Connect things via wires not local or global variables.  You will also need some shift registers.
4. Sequence structures are almost never required.  One exception: Single frame structures around something like the Wait function which does not have error clusters for dataflow.
5. Look at the Producer/Consumer Design Patterns which come with LV.  File >> New.. >> VI >>  From Template >> Frameworks >> Design Patterns..  The events version will be useful.  Also learn about state machines.  That architecture is versatile, powerful, adaptable, and much more likely to get you to where you need to be with your program.
6. The events will all be queued up in the internal event queue.  It just takes a long time for your program to get to them.  I like to keep the code in every event case simple enough that it executes before the user could get to the next button. The queued message handling in the Producer/Consumer takes care of this.
7.  You probably should have an event for Stop experiment.  It would send a command to the consumer loop to shut down all pumps, close files, and any other "cleaning up" which needs to be done before stopping the program.
This may seem like a lot, but you have most of the pieces.  Some re-arrangement and re-organization will help a lot.
Lynn