The starting question was simple to ask and harder to answer: can robotic engineering mixed with golf make someone a better golfer? Stuff Made Here tackled it with a club that reads the swing and fixes the shot for distance. Loft shifts in the last milliseconds before impact to hit a chosen distance, and a knob plus a display let it act as any iron, meaning eleven clubs can stay at home.
The construction mixes custom-machined parts with 3D-printed components. The clubhead combines machined aluminum with printed pieces, and a fast servo working through a cam system drives the actuator, designed in CAD. A driver club was sacrificed for the project. Sensors, microcontrollers and high-speed actuators are built in, with the electronics housed in a clear enclosure on the shaft next to a small OLED screen and knobs. A BNO085 IMU board sits inside, and after that board broke during the build, a custom USB driver was written to squeeze out its remaining functionality.
The software stands out most to me. It estimates clubhead speed at the moment of impact by matching the swing against a library of past swings, then reshapes an ideal velocity curve to fit the effort of each swing, and it accounts for how the club sits relative to the ground when the swing starts. The road there was bumpy: the first hydraulic prototype used pumps and hoses, but the hoses stretched too much and the shockwave from impact threw the clubface clean off, so that design got scrapped. Resin prototypes were hammer-struck to check the mechanism would survive.
One open item: finite element analysis never happened, with parts overbuilt instead of simulated, and slice and hook correction exists only as a separate prototype that rotates the clubface, set for a future version. The maker scored an 85 using it, versus a 94 with standard clubs, but is suspicious of the placebo effect, and firmer answers are planned once slice correction is finished.
Project by Stuff Made Here. Watch it on their YouTube channel: