Xitris: A Software to Acquire, Display, Compress, and Publish Data in Real Time using Distributed Mode for the Solar Radio Interferometer RIS

TL;DR

Xitris is an open-source, modular software system designed for real-time data acquisition, display, compression, and online publishing, optimized for low-resource hardware in solar radio interferometry.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, distributed software platform that enables real-time data handling on low-resource hardware for scientific radio observatories.

Findings

Successfully deployed at four radio observatories.

Operates efficiently with slow processors and limited memory.

Facilitates real-time data sharing via Internet.

Abstract

Upgrading the infrastructure of old scientific instruments requires the development of new hardware and software which may be expensive (in general, these projects lack of enough resources to acquire fast and modern infrastructure to become ompetitive and functional in the era of digital data). Particularly, the development of software for data acquisition in real time is one of the most important topics in experimental science and industry. However, the constant improvements on the data acquisition hardware, discourages the development of software highly optimized in order to minimize the consumption of resources like processor time and read/write memory, etc. In this work, we present a Open Source code called X Interface to RIS (Xitris). This is a modular and distributed code which, using relatively slow processors and low memory hardware, is able to acquire, display, compress and publish (via Internet) digital data in real time. Xitris was developed for the Solar Radio Interferometer (RIS) at Geophysics Institute of the National University of Mexico (UNAM) but nowadays is working in another 3 radio observatories.