OpenFlight¶

A golf launch monitor you build yourself. An OPS243-A Doppler radar measures ball and club speed; a TI IWR6843 mmWave radar measures launch angle and club path; a Raspberry Pi ties them together and streams shots to your simulator.

Everything here is open source, and every part is off the shelf.

What it measures¶

Start here¶

Build order¶

The hardware has real prerequisites — doing these out of order means redoing work.

1. Parts list — order everything before starting.
2. Sound trigger wiring — solder R17, then wire GATE → HOST_INT. The rolling-buffer capture depends on this.
3. Raspberry Pi setup — through the one-time rolling-buffer flash-persist step. Confirm you can capture with the OPS243 alone before adding anything else.
4. Move the OPS243 to the Pi GPIO UART — required before the IWR6843, which needs the USB bus.
5. IWR6843 operator guide — wire, flash, mount, aim, and measure the geometry.
6. Optional: inclinometer, battery, simulator connectors, cloud sync.

Once it's running¶

• Simulator connectors — stream shots to GSPro, OpenGolfSim, and others.
• Swing speed training — club-only mode for air swings and speed sticks. No ball strike, no sound trigger.
• Cloud sync — push filtered sessions to FlightWeb.
• Observability — ship session logs to Grafana Cloud.

Understanding the numbers¶

• Rolling buffer and spin detection — how a capture becomes a ball speed, and why spin is still experimental.
• Dechirped-sideband spin replay — the next-gen spin estimator test bench.
• TrackMan test process — how accuracy claims here were validated.