To address this challenge, a funding of $CLP 200M was granted by ANID (Chilean National Agency of R+D) to the Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) and its technical laboratory, which has also provided the opportunity to do research with students.

“The idea is to try to develop an solution that could be an alternative to replace the ABMs, which are computers that are responsible for monitoring and controlling in real time all the hardware devices in each antenna, using industrial equipment based on EtherCAT, also validating that this approach can be viable technically and economically”, says UFRO student, Sebastián Carrasco.

Sebastián, a graduated computing engineer, and the other students Rodrigo Seguel and Rodrigo Augsburger visited the OSF together with the professor in charge of this project, Patricio Galea, to get to know the systems they are investigating in the field.

“There are much more specialized topics that I would probably have overlooked if I didn’t have the chance to visit the laboratory at  ALMA”, says the student at UFRO. “Its also important to highlight that the Hardware in the Loop testing environment (HILSE) allowed us to test, verify and validate our design.”