Golf Ball Tracking with Raspberry Pi

Golf. Depending on who you talk to it’s a rather expensive obsession, or a silly game for others. However, as an engineer it’s hard to deny that the physics involved in driving a ball off the tee are quite interesting. Consider that a player has to not just hit the ball with sufficient force, alignment, and club angle, but the proper spin can mean the difference between a great shot and donating your ball to the alligators.

James Pilgrim’s DIY Golf Launch Monitor aims to take this outdoor sport into the virtual realm, pulling velocity and spin stats from whacked balls via a clever Raspberry Pi Camera configuration. He’s using two global shutter cameras to capture the ball as it leaves the tee, along with dual Raspberry Pi 4 SBCs for processing. The goal is to get pricing for the project under $300, and with a few optimizations (such as using a Pi 5 instead of two Pi 4s), Pilgrim thinks he can get it there.

Code for the system was written largely in C++, and involves a wide range of techniques and technologies. A circuit board was designed in KiCad and ordered from JLCPCB – his first professionally built PCB – to connect hardware elements together. With everything set up, he’s been able to interface it with simulator GSPro for indoor golf experimentation.

While an impressive project, it’s still in somewhat of a prototype state, and much of the write-up focuses on how to produce the proper accuracy and precision with it. To this end, Pilgrim hopes to publish the code as open-source, allowing others to improve and iterate on his work. It will be exciting to see how this project develops, and for now you can see a demo of the setup in the video below.