You are building a State Machine, but are doing it in an overly-complicated way. An especially simple way, particularly for someone not so experienced in LabVIEW, is to build a Queued State Machine using the Producer/Consumer Design Pattern to handle Front Panel Controls (like Start and Stop).
Open LabVIEW. Go to the File menu, choose New ... (the one with three dots), and open From Template, Frameworks, Design Patterns, Producer/Consumer Design Pattern (Events). This will show you how, when the user pushes Start, you can put the Acquire State on the Queue.
The Consumer loop on the bottom becomes a Queued State Machine. It waits to dequeue a State, and when it does, it uses a Case Statement to execute the code for that State (just as you do in your Acquire State).
Now you need to think about what States you need for your State Machine. Particularly for an Acquisition Task, you should have (as a minimum) Initialize (the hardware), Acquire (a data point), optionally Process (the data point), and Stop (and clean up after yourself). You will probably have at least two controls, Start (begin Acquiring) and Stop (finish and clean up).
The Producer Task is only concerned with handling the Start and Stop buttons, which cause it to put the Acquire and Stop States on the State Machine's Queue. As long as no button is being pushed, this loop takes no time to execute, so you can otherwise ignore it.
The Consumer Loop does all the work. How do we get started? Specifically, how do we get "Initialize" onto the State Queue? Simple -- just enqueue it before entering the Consumer Loop (i.e. outside the While loop). This will put it first on the Queue, and you'll Initialize and wait for someone to push Start or Stop.
So how do we take the second point? [We take the first when Start is pushed]. Again, simple -- when do you want to take the second point? Do you want to wait between points? Fine, make a Wait State, and in the Consumer's Acquire State, enqueue Wait. The Wait state has your delay, and it, in turn, enqueues "Acquire". Do you want to process each point? Every other point? Something else? Fine, figure out where you want to do this and enqueue the Process State (remember to enqueue what comes after Process, perhaps Wait).
Your code uses Dynamic Events, which is a "more advanced" topic than the simple Event Structure, which should be all you would need. Note that if you do need to "export" some of the processing to a sub-VI, it almost always makes the most sense to keep the code involving the Front Panel (like the Event loop) in the Main VI, and to pass a Queue Reference (if you are using a Queued State Machine in your sub-VI) to the sub-VI.
Hope this is helpful to you.
Bob Schor
P.S. -- you note you have familiarity with VBA, Java, and other languages. Would you consider doing a major project with one of these languages if you "first got it in July, with the project due in September"? As I am sure you already know, learning proficiency in any language takes time and benefits a lot from on-going guidance (which means "a mentor"). We'll try to be your Missing Mentor.
