What if the device sitting on your garage floor tracking every shot you hit — the one normally priced like a used car — was actually open-source, hackable, and yours to own forever? That’s the audacious bet behind OpenFlight, a DIY launch monitor project that has turned a cold December, a bag of radar parts, and a Raspberry Pi into one of the most interesting stories in golf tech right now.
In this Life At The Turn Live Q&A, host Jamie sits down with Coleman Rollins (a.k.a. Coleman Golfs online), a self-taught software engineer and ice technician by day, who has spent the last nine months quietly building a launch monitor from off-the-shelf parts. The conversation is part tech deep-dive, part origin story, and part call for community testers.
▶ Watch the full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=XU8nwukypH4
5 Highlights You’ll Want to Know About
1. It’s genuinely open-source — code you can download for free.
OpenFlight doesn’t mean “cheap knockoff.” It means the entire codebase is free, transparent, and modifiable by anyone. Coleman built it using AI tools (mostly Claude), which he credits with writing roughly 100% of the code now. The only constraints are off-the-shelf parts, assembled in a 3D-printed housing.
2. It measures the full major launch-monitor metric stack.
OpenFlight currently reads ball speed, club speed, horizontal and vertical launch angle, spin, angle of attack, and club path — then rolls those into a physics-based carry estimate. Coleman estimates spin by detecting the wobble/vibration of the ball in flight, a radar technique shared with him directly by one of his radar manufacturers.
3. Total parts cost is around $500 (and that floor isn’t easy to break).
The build uses two radars (a Doppler unit from Omnipresence for speed/spin, and a second radar for angles), a Raspberry Pi (the “brain”), a screen, and a sound detector that triggers data crunching on ball strike. The Raspberry Pi alone has doubled in price since December ($60 → $130), so the ~$500 budget is essentially the floor right now.
4. It plugs into GSPro and Open Golf Sim.
If your sim PC is on the same Wi-Fi, OpenFlight can act as the launch monitor source for GSPro — meaning this $500 DIY rig could feed a serious simulator session. No PC-bottleneck, no proprietary cables. Just same-network detection.
5. Data ownership is the real philosophy.
OpenFlight is built around a thesis most brands ignore: your launch data should belong to you. Coleman’s companion site, openflight.dev, lets you upload session files from any launch monitor — TrackMan, GCQuad, Garmin, OpenFlight — and store everything in one place for free. By contrast, TrackMan “makes it really hard to download session data,” as Coleman put it. The Square Golf monitor was one of the few that let you one-click to CSV.
What Coleman Is Worried About (and Why)
Coleman didn’t pull punches on the rest of the industry:
- The Garmin R10 claims a long list of metrics, but its hardware uses just one small radar. After Coleman’s own testing, he called those claims “bold.“
- TrackMan is expensive (~$30,000) but the radar tech inside is genuinely sophisticated enough to justify the price.
- He even pulled apart competitors by reading their FCC filing photos (publicly available) to see what’s really inside — a series that briefly got an angry DM from one “white-and-red” brand asking him to take it down.
- His model of choice he’d steal: the Shot Scope LM1 at $200 — for sheer portability and price point.
But the bigger takeaway is his pairing of AI + open community + hardware hacking as the future of golf tech. He wants to eventually ship OpenFlight kits so people who don’t want to source their own parts can still join in.
Want to Help, or Just Watch What Happens Next?
This is the kind of project that lives or dies on community input — testers, code contributors, and curious golfers who actually use it on real swings. The best way to follow along (and potentially test gear in your own setup) is to plug into the Life At The Turn community, where beta tests like this get coordinated with real golfers every week:
👉 Join here: community.lifeattheturn.com
Once you’re in, head to the Technology forum to follow OpenFlight build logs, share your own experiments, and find out when testing slots open up. It’s free, and the people building the next generation of golf tech are already in there.