How it works
You hit a ball. Four seconds later you know where it went.
No PC in the chain, no box on the wall, no cables across the grass. A launch monitor on the ground, a phone in a stand, and whatever screens you feel like pointing at it.
The chain
Four pieces, and you already own two of them.
Pair the monitor
Put the R10 down behind the ball, open the app, and connect it once. After that it just finds it.
Pick a course
Ten real ones are in there. Pick nine or eighteen, add whoever is playing, and tee off.
Hit
Every strike comes through with the full set of numbers, and the ball flies the way those numbers say it should.
Putt it out
Set the ball where it tells you on the putting mat and roll it. A camera calls it in or out.
The ball flight
Your numbers, not a canned animation.
The monitor hands over ball speed, launch angle, azimuth, spin rate and spin axis. From there it is flown properly: lift from the spin, drag from the speed, gravity, the lot, stepped out until it hits the ground.
Which means the descent angle is something the flight produces, not something we pick. A flushed wedge drops in steeply and stops. A skulled one comes in shallow and runs out forever, exactly like it does on the course, and you get to watch it happen instead of guessing.
Where it lands decides what happens next. Green, fringe, fairway, rough, deep stuff: each rolls differently and each holds a different slope. Land on a steep enough bank and the ball will not stay there, same as real life.
What comes in off the monitor
- Ball speed
- Launch angle and direction
- Spin rate and spin axis
- Club head speed and smash factor
- Club path and face angle, on models that report it
What comes out
- Carry and total distance
- Apex height
- Descent angle, calculated from the flight
- Offline left or right
- The lie you are actually in now
Screens
Three screens, and two of them can be junk.
There is a small web server inside the app. Anything on your wifi with a browser can open the round, which is the whole trick to making this work with a group.
Phone one
The one that runs it
Pairs to the launch monitor, draws the hole, keeps the card. Mirror it to your projector or TV, or just leave it in a stand beside the mat and watch the big screen instead.
Needs to be your decent phone. The rest do not.
Phone two
The putting camera
Any old phone clipped to a tripod, pointed at the putting mat. It does one job and does not need to be fast or new. Somebody's phone who came over works fine for the night, then they take it home.
The one in the drawer with the cracked corner.
Anything else
The watch screen
Open the address on a TV, a tablet, a laptop or a smart projector. Full scorecard for everybody playing, the last five shots with whoever hit them, and the complete set of numbers next to the view of the green.
Whatever is already on the wall.
It all stays on your own network. The watch page is served by the phone in your yard, not by us. Nothing about your round leaves the house.
Putting
The part everyone else skips.
Most cheap setups just gimme you inside some distance, or make you tap a number, and your scorecard quietly becomes fiction. We wanted the putts to count.
So: a putting mat with cups in it, and a phone on a tripod looking at it. When you get on the green it tells you out loud how far you are and which cup to use, so you set the ball down without ever picking a phone up. Then you putt. The camera watches the ball leave, watches where it ends up, and calls it in or out.
It keeps announcing the target every few seconds while you are standing over it, because you will forget, and it shuts up while the ball is rolling, because being hollered at mid stroke is awful.
This is the hardest part of the whole thing and it took a lot of rounds in the dark to get right. If it ever calls one wrong for you, tell us and we will go and look at it.
What you need
Before you buy anything, check this list.
A launch monitor
The Garmin Approach R10 is what we build and test against. Used ones turn up around $300. What we know about the others.
Somewhere to hit
A net and a mat. Garage, yard, driveway. The R10 wants a few feet behind the ball and a few feet of flight, so a shed is tight but a one car garage is fine.
A phone
Android or iPhone, anything from the last few years. A second old one if you want putting, and it really can be old.
Optional: something to project on
A cheap projector on the net makes it a lot more fun. Not required. Plenty of people will just play off the phone.
Optional: a putting mat with cups
Needed only for camera putting. Without one you can still play, you just handle the putts yourself.
Optional: lights
If you are hitting outside you will end up hitting at night, and then you will want them. Ask us how we know.
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