The story behind Duilio

I was born in the early 1980s. As a kid, I spent hours building improvised tracks: toy cars, RC projects, and homemade push go-karts in a soapbox style, like today’s Red Bull races. Today we would call them maker projects. Back then, it was simply how I played.

I studied mechanical engineering. For many years now, I’ve been working as a designer for a large company. Not my own.

But outside of work, I’ve always remained a maker. That’s where Duilio comes from.

Duilio is part of a broader remote-driving project. The idea was to allow someone who hasn’t been able to leave home for many years to control a real machine remotely from their PC, as if they were there.

One of the first applications was mowing the grass in my garden from a distance. A real machine, with real motors and real problems.

During development, I kept hitting the same limitation: motors existed, drivers worked, but the most fragile part was always the same — the motion logic.

Not so much because of what it did, but because of how it changed every time.

With each different driver and each different controller, the programming model changed. Solutions became obsolete quickly, and development boards grew less and less compatible with each other.

And sooner or later, something subtle would ruin the balance: small electrical noise issues, extra components added as patches, software adapted or rewritten every time.

Ramps, limits, coordination, fault handling. Every project was almost a fresh start.

At some point, I decided to do something simple: design a proper board to control motors.

Not for a quick prototype. But for a real machine.

That board turned out better than expected. And that’s where Duilio was born.

Today, Duilio is a solid foundation for motion control: a system designed to add safety, coordination, and repeatability on top of external motor drivers, without reinventing everything every time.

If you’re building a real machine, Duilio comes from exactly the same kind of problem.

— Fabio Giuliodori