I made a self correcting golf club

this is not a normal golf club obviously it can do two very special things the first is that it's all the golf clubs in one say i wanted this to be an eight iron all i do is turn this knob boom now it's an eight iron maybe i want it to be a two iron turn the knob now it's two iron and that's really cool but that's not even the coolest thing that this club does i have a problem where i can't swing the golf club consistently at all i'd really rather say to the club i would like the ball to go maybe 120 yards and then when i swing the club it will detect what's going on and then correct the head of the club in real time to make my shot go closer to the desired distance so i'm going to show you how i made this how it works and of course put it to the test i'll also be challenging my wife to a shipping competition so is this not a prank it's a golf club how could it possibly be prank this project totally kicked my engineering butt it took two major hardware iterations to get it right the first club that i built was actually hydraulic which sounds totally awesome but also doesn't work for reasons that i'll get into so in this design i focus on adjusting the loft angle of the club which is the angle of the face striking the ball what i'm doing is i'm sensing where the club is going as well as the speed and adjusting the loft angle so that the ball goes basically the right distance i also made this i guess apparatus you'd call it it goes on to the upper shaft of the golf club near the grip and allows me to rotate the entire face of the club this should allow me to correct for slice and hook i do plan to integrate this in a club i'll probably make a future video about that although in the meantime i'm really interested in the idea of human robot augmentation not just for being sports i think the next frontier for me is music i want to see if i can make myself good at violin and take the fun out of that as well so if that sounds interesting you should subscribe also if you have any other good ideas about human robot augmentation leave a comment i'd love to hear about them and maybe i'll build them getting the face of the club to move to a different angle at least in principle is not very hard certainly nowhere near as difficult as the backboard that i built in my previous project it's small and light and the distance that i have to go is not very far but it turns out it's very hard to do and that's because of golf when the ball strikes the face of the club it is insanely violent it's like walmart at 5am on black friday they only have three flat screen tvs but they're 25 it's bad it can generate up to 4 000 pounds of force as a point of reference my milling machine is 2 000 pounds it's crazy so this is a little hobby servo it's used for rc planes and cars and stuff like that this little arm moves left and right and they're very handy i could attach this to the face of the golf club and move it around to get it to go where i want problem is imagine i then take a hammer and i smash this arm it's gonna destroy this so my first attempt to deal with these giant forces was building a hydraulic golf club which isn't as insane as it sounds maybe a little bit i needed a way to move the face angle of the club quickly and also in a way that's very stiff and can take a beating i designed and made two little hydraulic pumps that can pump fluid through these hoses this is obviously not yet miniaturized for the golf club i'd probably be wearing this on my back the hydraulic fluid goes through these tubes and actuates two hydraulic cylinders that i built into the club so unfortunately this club has a pretty fatal flaw which is that it breaks apart every time you use it when i originally designed this system i was planning on using proper hydraulic line so when i ran the numbers i saw that i would basically need two of these engines to force the fluid through the hoses fast enough imagine trying to suck a 55 gallon milkshake through a straw in 10 seconds you'd have to be able to suck pretty darn hard in order for that to happen but if you make the straw bigger it becomes easier to do that so to make the system work i bumped the size of the hoses up and this is where i committed a terrible sin that totally perverted the design but i knew what i was doing i honestly even liked it these hoses are stretchy they're very stretchy if you pressurize them they get longer and that's a problem for a hydraulic system where i'm generating high pressures and i need it to not move when i swing the club and hit a ball i don't feel the impact of that ball with the club until the ball has already left the club and is flying away and this is due to the speed of sound when i strike a golf ball with a golf club it generates a pressure wave in the material which as far as physics are concerned is basically sound it goes at the speed of sound up the golf club in 500 microseconds the sound will go to maybe about here and this is what i was hoping would make my hydraulic system work even though the hoses were stretchy the shock wave from hitting the ball with this club would generate pressure in the fluid which would also go at the speed of sound and it should only go not too far up the hose before the ball is gone there's only this much hose that can stretch out and i was hoping that would mean the face would move a minimal amount and that would be acceptable the problem as far as i can tell is that that wave does propagate up the hoses the system is very springy so all that energy goes up and then it shoots right back down and launches the face of the club off to try to deal with this i did get some proper hydraulic hose with the right inside diameter but this is just way too heavy i can't put this on a golf club i decided just to scrap this which hurt me to do is very sad i really like this club a lot it's very cool looking it just isn't good enough all right i think i have a conceptual way for how to make an actuator that can survive the forces of golfing without immediately breaking but i am having a heck of a time trying to fit into a club this is probably iteration five or six of this design and this one almost kind of works but it still has some pretty fatal flaws i think i just keep chugging i think i'm close [Music] [Music] okay so here's what i came up with i'm using a servo a really fast one to actuate the face of the golf club and i know i said before that servo motors can't work but this one works because i'm doing a very sneaky trick i'm rotating the face of the golf club by moving this rotational cam here the geometry is such that it does not matter how hard i hit the face of this golf club with the golf ball zero force is going to be transferred to the servo and let me explain why this red triangle represents the cam that's moved left and right by the servo this blue represents the matching cam that's that's rotated when this moves in and out so if this red cam slides out the blue cam slides down and vice versa this is how it converts linear motion into rotational motion the reason that my arrangement works is that this angle is very shallow i can push on the top of this green wedge with any amount of force and it will not be able to push this wedge out basically what happens is as this angle gets shallow the contact forces between the two surfaces increases which increases the friction also when i push down on the top of this wedge portion of the force is going sideways trying to eject this wedge from underneath of it there's an angle the force to eject the wedge is less than the frictional force and it does not matter how much force i put on the top it will not eject a neat little parallel is this is why screws don't unscrew if you think about it a screw is just a wedge that's wrapped around a shaft if the thread is shallow enough it doesn't matter how hard i push or pull on the screw it won't unthread so the other cool thing about this design is that it was fully qualified using almost entirely 3d printed parts i did this because i didn't want to spend a bunch of time machining a lot of parts that don't work at all so in fact i normally wouldn't even have attempted this but i'm using a very special material called durable it's designed for high impact and high wear applications which is great for a golf club i did eventually break it so it is cracked here and that happened when i plowed the golf club into the ground at what felt like mach 1 but we'll never know the speed for years i ran the engineering teams that developed these printers and i hated this material because it is really difficult to get it printing reliably and so i just had a blind hatred for it but now that i'm using it it's quite good so after qualifying the parts with printed parts i went back and machined these although i can use the club with the printed parts they do flex a good bit more than metal does and that absorbs a lot of energy from the swing you can you can actually feel a pretty big difference i'm still using 3d printed add-ons for the stuff that doesn't have to be metal and that way i don't have to machine it the cam parts are still printed and that's basically because they would be a real nightmare to machine and with my setup there's nothing really inherently bulky about this design which is pretty cool if i made these out of say steel this whole mechanism could be way smaller than it is here the same thing is true for this servo there's no reason it needs to be this big and all the wires could be run up the shaft all the electronics would be on could be on one small pcb kind of in the top of the handle with a small battery so i finally have mechanics that i think can work i just have to get the software and the electronics working so i was just working on bringing up the electronics for this and you're not going to believe what i just did all right pins just straighten up a little bit thank goodness i'm a mature adult who can handle this in a very mature way i promise that's exactly how it went down so this board is the imu it's what i'll be using to figure out where the club is in space and how fast it's going and all that stuff i just ripped off these cancellations which are what i was going to be using to get data off this board and this board is very expensive it's about 350 so i'm not going to be buying another one there's usb on this as well theoretically i should be able to talk to this over usb and get the data off that way unfortunately i suck at usb like i said i'm not buying another one so i guess i'm writing a usb driver oh man it's like 5 am on sunday morning i've been banging my head against this stupid usb thing for like 10 hours now and i should have just bought another imu this is a mistake the reason that it has been working is because i had a one instead of a four anyway it works now and i'm going to sleep all right i got some sleep let's talk about the software what the software needs to do is determine the speed that the club head is going to be going when it impacts the ball as well as the angle of the club shaft relative to the ground it's not a good assumption that the club shaft is vertical i need to know the angle of the club shaft so the club face is the right angle relative to the world and the ground in gravity so that the ball will go in the right direction if you look at a club swing the club starts at a standstill it accelerates throughout the stroke and it will sometimes even drop speed before it hits the ball when i start the swing the club isn't going very fast as i accelerate it the speed gets faster and faster the reason this is tricky is that i need to rotate the face of the club to whatever angle it needs to go before it strikes the ball and the speed is changing all the time so what i'm trying to do is predict the speed that the face of the club will be going relative to the ball earlier so i did as i just kind of brute forced this problem i collected a ton of data of me swinging each swing gives me a curve of the velocity i'm going versus the angle of the club so this might be the start of the stroke up here and then this is the velocity that's going when it strikes the ball swings that start shallower like a chip might look like this because the club is starting at a lower angle i'm at zero velocity here you can imagine collecting lots of these and there's noise so what i do is i take all these curves and i compute the average swing trajectory for each starting position this one might correspond to this position and so on then when the club senses me swinging i look up the closest curve so let's imagine that i'm taking a swing and i've matched to this swing profile the tricky thing is that depending on if i'm swinging the club harder or softer i might get a profile like this or i might get a profile like this i also might get something totally different in which case this method breaks down i have some ideas for how i would deal with that but i was trying to keep it simpler so imagine i start taking a swing and it's going to follow this trajectory as the data starts to come in from the imu i see what my velocity profile looks like i then take the ideal velocity curve and i scale it so that it matches this one it doesn't perfectly predict the result because they're different trajectories although the shapes do seem to be relatively consistent and then i look forward to the end and assume that's the speed that i'm going to be going this seems to work reasonably for my testing it's tuned to me obviously if i was trying to make this a product i wouldn't use this method but it was a quick way to to get it done so the other problem that i mentioned is i don't know what angle the club is going to be when it strikes the ball which of these is it going to be this has a very big impact on where the ball goes this problem is a tricky one and i actually thought of a few very complicated schemes to try to predict what the angle would be so i just decided to sidestep the whole problem by assuming that the swing starts at the ball so i just assume that if the club is like this when the swing starts and then the swing comes up and then comes back down it's gonna hit at the same angle that's not a totally safe assumption it seems okay for now that's pretty much all the interesting things about this club i did pack all the electronics into this way too small enclosure so this thing has two main operating modes there's distance select where i enter the distance that i would like the ball to go and whenever it's in this mode it's continuously listening to the imu and it's looking for a swing it will start adjusting the face of the club to wherever it thinks it needs to be so the ball will go the correct distance and the other mode is basically this acting like a normal club so i have the ability to select whatever club i want with this i think the notable thing here is it does go up to 11 i mean it has to right i guess that would be a sand wedge even just this mode here is pretty cool the fact that i have a single club that's all the clubs is neat but i think the robotic aspect is cooler that's pretty much it i think all that's left is to put this thing through its paces i've challenged my life to a friendly shipping challenge and what we're gonna do is take three shots each and see who can place them most consistently downrange short distance so no strength advantage anything like that and we're going to see with the help of this if it levels the playing field so is this another prank it's a golf club how could it possibly be a prank this club stinks maybe you stink i just played 18 holes of a par 3 with this club it survived and i have the results with this club i shot in 85 which still isn't great and with the regular clubs i shot a 94 and that sounds like a meaningful difference but i'm not sure that all that had to do with this club at least not directly when i'm using this club i feel like a better golfer and i was just hitting the ball better with it to really know i need to collect more data i think what i need to do is shoot like 500 balls with them without this club and then measure the distribution but i'd really like to get the slice and hook correction in before i do that because i only want to do that once hopefully we'll get back to it and have a super duper club in the near future if you like this you should subscribe i build stuff like this all the time it's a lot of fun and that is all i have for now thanks

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 3,336,931

Rating: 4.9584255 out of 5

Keywords: become a better golfer, golf club, golf swing, reduce handicap quickly, reduce golf handicap, golf clubs explained, programming, accelerometer, IMU, cnc, 3d printing, 3d printed, how-to, electronics project, automatic golf club, maker, stuff made here, golf ball, electric golf cliub, golf hack, cnc machined, engineering, robotics, robot golf, golf, awesome, golfswing, improve ball striking, project, diy, electronics, arduino, technology, incredible invention, tech, how to make

Id: o5Cv9fvajrc

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/tickettoride98]

r/13or30

Thought he was an enterprising 18 year old until he said wife and I had to take a closer look.

[u/savageotter]

I am most impressed that this dude has a garage CNC milling machine.

[u/DasUberVega]

As an Engineer watching this video, I feel like a failure lol this guy is awesome

[u/st-john-mollusc]

"I should not like to be seen carrying an illegal golf club around Wentworth, sir."

[u/hijklmno]

There's also footage of his automatic putter in action.

[u/klayb]

That wife mode had me dead hahaha

[u/alex_dlc]

Here's a swingless golf club https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID3SzQzQKlw

[u/GersonD]

LOL "I want to make a violin video to take the fun out of that too."

[u/chineseouchie]

What drawing app / software is he using?