Why I'm Building a Launch Monitor

Welcome to the first Trackeon dev blog. Before I get into any of the tech, I figured I'd explain how I ended up here, because it really did start with me getting annoyed at golf.

I'm new to the game. New enough that I genuinely don't know how far I hit most of my clubs yet, which everyone keeps telling me is sort of the whole point. The advice is always to go dial in your distances, and the gold-standard way to do that at home is an indoor simulator. Swing in your garage, get instant numbers, practice when it's raining. I loved the idea right up until I saw what one costs. A proper sim runs into five figures, and even if I had that kind of money sitting around, I don't have a room where I can swing a driver without taking out a light fixture.

So that wasn't happening. All I really wanted was to practice at home and stop guessing my distances at the range.

The sensible middle option is a phone-based launch monitor. Your phone does the measuring and you skip the giant expensive rig. So I went looking for one, and that's where I got stuck. Every app I found was iPhone only. I'd see one, get excited, and then hit the same wall: not available on Android. I've been an Android user for as long as I've owned a phone, and after researching all night it started to feel like nobody had even tried to build this for my side of the fence.

What bugged me most is that I was pretty sure there was no real reason for it. I've built apps before, and some of that work leaned heavily on computer vision and physics, tracking objects through a camera feed and turning that motion into actual numbers. So I had a decent idea of what these phones can do. Many Android phones have the same, or better, kind of camera and the same horsepower an iPhone does. The math doesn't care which logo is on the back. There just wasn't a good technical excuse for this gap.

So I started building, pretty much right away.

That's what Trackeon will be: a launch monitor that runs on your phone whether it's Android or iOS and uses the camera to measure what your ball actually did. No ten-thousand-dollar simulator and no borrowing a friend's iPhone.

I'm planning to write this blog as I go, mostly because I think the process is the interesting part. I'll get into how the ball tracking works, why doing it in real time on a phone is harder than it sounds, what happens when the lighting or the background refuses to cooperate, and how I'm checking my numbers against the expensive machines to make sure they hold up.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, stick around. See you on the range.