U64 Millisecond Tick Count Utility

We all know and love the built-in tick count (mSec) function in LabVIEW. It unfortunately has two intrinsic limitations which, at one point or another, we've all probably encountered. The first is that its output is a U32, which means that it wraps after 2^32 - 1 mSec, or roughly every 49.7 days. The second difficulty is that we don't know when the wrap will happen; it could be tomorrow, or seven weeks from today. The value of the millisecond tick doesn't seem to be tied to any external temporal reference. Well, I've got a solution that at least tackles the first issue... it's the U64 Tick Count.vi shown below.




Its operation is pretty simple and self-explanatory. It's a functional global, in the sense of using uninitialized shift registers in order to maintain state data between calls. When the U32 time function wraps around, 2^32 is added to a running offset count, and the VI has a capability to properly initialize things on its first call. Since I use this in both Windows and RT applications, there's a Conditional Disable structure to provide the appropriate mSec tick function for each. (I'd like to post the VI itself for download, but I haven't yet figured out how to do this on Blogspot. If any of you intrepid readers could fill me in, I'd be grateful.)

With a U64 output, this millisecond timer will wrap approximately every 584 million years. I would guess that this should be sufficient for most applications.