Galileo Engineering srl

Our company and customers

Our company was founded in 1998 and over the years we've been working with leading companies such as Giochi Preziosi SpA, Landi Renzo SpA, IK Multimedia, Hornby Hobbies PLC

We are also the company behind iconic model racing cars also known by the brand names Slot.it and the 2.4 GHz wireless oXigen racing system. All these products have been designed by us. We have more than 15 years of experience working with Far East suppliers.

Feel free to contact us, if you think our expertise can help your company, by email or phone - follow the 'contacts' links for complete details. Fluent English and Spanish spoken, as well, of course, as Italian.

The two founders

The two founders, Maurizio Ferrari and Maurizio Gibertoni, are Electrical Engineers.

Maurizio Ferrari graduated in Bologna in spring 1990 with a dissertation on "software assisted automatic calculations of design parameters of a radial engine". His interest in software pushed him to write code on a vast array of computers ranging from the Cray X-MP 48 to the early Microchip PIC. He joined Magneti Marelli in 1993 and later Ferrari F1 where he held a position as chief designer of the Engine Control unit firmware and was also responsible for the deployment of software versioning system. He wrote two articles published by Circuit Cellar. Speaks fluent English, good Spanish, decent French and some German. He's often travelling to the Far East for manufacturing reasons.

Maurizio Gibertoni graduated cum laude in Bologna in 1986 with a dissertation on circuit simulation. He held positions in academic research institutes (in Trento and Bologna), presenting papers on digital circuits at important international conferences (ESSCIRC 1991). He later joined the private industrial sector where he held a position as chief designer for industrial sensors at a leading industry who later hired him as consultant. Within Galileo he deals mostly with hardware design and production of Galileo's own products.

Our electronic products

Apart from one-off designs according to our customer's specification, we sell a Electronic Amplifier Plug for proportional valves, and a forklift control board. Most of all, though, we are probably known for the oXigen 2.4 GHz control system

meet oXigen

In the last years most of our design efforts have been focused on the world of small scale racing – also known as ‘slot car racing’. Apart from being the makers of fine racing models and state of the art tuning parts, we decided that a new approach was necessary if the world of slot car racing had to evolve beyond the current offerings for the so-called ‘digital slot racing’.

Being engineers and racers, we designed and built a proprietary 2.4GHz system named oXigen (Oxygen in Catalan language) as none of the commercially available offerings met our requirements. Now, after more than seven years of development, we believe that our 2.4GHz system may find interesting industrial applications as well.

Despite its apparently humble task (after all, we’re dealing with toy cars), the requirements from ‘anorak’ players are quite demanding. Traditionally, the player is used to having a direct, analog, wired connection to the model car, as such being void of any delays or interference. Thus, we have to deliver a driving feeling which must be indistinguishable from what the racer is used to, taking in account the crowded and shared space in the 2.4GHz realm.

On top of that, we wanted to create an environment where the race director would have complete control on pretty much every aspect of the play field.

The system is a star network of up to twenty (extendible to forty-eight) modules, where a PC is the central command and control console and each module, in the current form, consists of a master and a slave. Each master is a bridge between the slave and the central intelligence (a PC).

The communication between the masters and the PC is done on two (for redundancy) shared frequencies through a 2.4 GHz USB key. The PC sends information to the remote masters every 30ms, such information packet consisting of a private (addressing each master in round robin fashion) part and a public part. The public part is read by all masters at the same time, whereas the private part is, as expected, read only by the master node which the message is being addressed to. It is thus possible to send information to all masters at once and to address the single node as well.

When addressed individually during the round robin operation, each single master returns a payload to the central PC’s 2.4GHz USB receiver dongle. In its current form the payload consists of racing car status such as on / off track, in or out of pitlane, throttle average, lap timing and counter, together with other parameters such as master and slave firmware versions and quality of radio link.

The communication between the master and the slave peaks at a frequency of 200Hz, with a 66Hz average, and happens on three different 2.4 GHz channel, all of the three channels being used within the 30 mS base time slot. All masters and slave pairs operate on their own independent frequencies, and are independent of each other.

In the current specialized firmware the masters send power and braking information to the slave (in-car pcb), merging the drivers’ requests (e.g. throttle and brake, lane changing action) and the working parameters received from the PC (e.g. speed, braking and lane changing limits) in a coherent set of control parameters. The returned payload from the slave to the master carries lap timing information as well as some other parameters such as firmware release and radio communication diagnostic information.

The firmware for the PC USB receiver can be easily upgraded from the PC, whereas the master and slave’s firmware is reprogrammable Over-The-Air (OTA) from the PC itself through the USB 2.4 GHz dongle, using our own custom written PC Bootloading software.

The next generation of master and slaves is reprogrammable using a simple smart phone – either Android or iOs

The video below shows what's certainly the largest race of this type on Earth. All electronics management system is based on oxigen.