Ernest Sports ES16 - New Camera Based LM

[Stonebattle]

RR:
I like the independend lab test idea a lot. I wish they would do that, but they are not going to, because we all know the results would counterdict their lofty/unrealistic claims.

[BGCurtis2nd]

I would love to see that kind of testing done myself, when I was having a lot of problems and was using the Mizuno JPX 850 irons I was told they had connections with Mizuno and were going to get a set of irons like mine and test them to see if there was a problem with my clubs, we also talked about the different ball companies they were working with and the close connection they had with them. I ask if they could set up an ES-16 where they used the robots for testing and see how well the readings matched. That subject got changed back to my clubs and what was going on with them real fast, now I didn't think to much of it at the time because I was more concerned with the problems I was having, but now look back on it and believe that they knew back then that the system would not pass the test.

[Stonebattle]

I was wondering if my unit was somehow different than most others out there. As I turns out, it is. I sent my unit in last year and Ernest Sport kept it for a while. They found one of the doppler radars was malfunctioning and they also replaced the original light board with an updated one that is now used in new units.

As I understand it, there are three light modules and most still have the original light module. The original, an updated one with more light output and a prototype one that was used in the outdoor version that did not hit production.

I don't know, but I suppose this could account for at least some of the improved results I am getting.

You can find out what board you have. Go the the progamming menu on the unit. Arrow over to the one marked LED.
0 = Original light module
1 = New light module
2 = Outdoor light module

[RangeRunner]

Interesting about the dopplers. I am continuing to mess with mine to determine what's going on with ball speed. Today I covered the back dopplers, then the front dopplers, then both dopplers and hit a bunch of shots. The ball speed and club head speed results didn't change (unless a different club was selected). (From Ernest: "With the ES16 Tour, we use Doppler radars to measure club speed and ball speed.") This really leads me to question why Ernest didn't have me send my unit it as I suggested. I was pretty clear in telling them that ball speed was the issue that concerned me. :/ I'm stymied. I'll check my LED tomorrow and report back. Thanks Stonebattle!

[Baller]

I supposedly have that new board as well, but I don’t get accurate readings. I will double check with this process when I get home at the end of this week.

[RangeRunner]

I checked my LED status tonight and it is a 0, original light module.

I had purchased this for outdoor use. I was really interested in Angle of Attack and getting a good measurement on that.

I'm wondering if you could get away with setting up some shade for the hitting area when outside and use indoor mode outside, or if it would be too bright....?

[BGCurtis2nd]

I no longer have an ES-16, but when I did I was promised a new unit with the new light-board in it, but I never received one and was told they were not being massed produced and hard to get. I spent lots of time calibrating my unit and scrolling through the menu seems to me if I recall correctly mine was 0. I know Bubba22 and I had talked about the lighting and I had placed a IR LED spot light above my ES-16 and it helped on a lot of readings, I had even reported that back to Ernest Sports and sent them the info on which IR LED spot I was using and sent them this picture of it. I know when I saw the pictures of the so called out door unit I thought that it looked like they used the same kind of LEDs I have on my lighting.

[BGCurtis2nd]

RangeRunner I thought I had put up the post about the trouble I had with the radar unit. I had one ES-16 that I complained about for months and they had me re-calibrating it and kinds of stuff and even wanted me to send them in a video of me doing the re-calibration so they could see that I was doing it correctly. I finally demanded they check my unit out and sent it back to them only to have them tell me it was a bad radar unit, that when they dissembled the unit they found a crack on the inside and believed the unit had been hit and told me I was lucky I had the extended coverage, then blamed me for having not found the problem, that they had to take the unit apart to find. I would really love to know what is really measured and what is just guessed at or made up on the readings with the ES-16.

[Baller]

Confirmed that I do have the new LED Board. Also just downloaded a new 157 Firmware. Anyone try this one yet?

[Stonebattle]

Baller:
I tried FW 157 over the weekend. I hate to say it, but I cannot get good readings, even after calibrating several times. I might suggest folks wait.
What are you finding?

[Stonebattle]

Well, after the 7th recalibration, I seem to be getting reasonble results for the most part. I am not sure what the deal is here, but the unit seems very sensitive to calibration. I performed it the same way every time, except I turned the unit off for a few seconds after I erased the last calibration and then turned it back on in the last two calibration attempts. I am not sure if that makes a difference or not, but hey there it is.

After each calibration I was getting different results and sometimes way different. I would say it has settled down now and I am getting about the same results I was getting before I updated to FW 157. There is one difference, the right bias I had before seems to be gone and the horizontal launch angle seems to be around 0 degrees rather than 2.5 degrees right. Horizontal launch angle variation has not improved, in my view, in the firmware version.

[RangeRunner]

When I was calibrating mine, I noticed that the middle of the paper was folding upwards and moved the ball ever so slightly. I taped it down so everything laid flat from edge to edge. I'd bet that a little bit of edge curl could change the results quite dramatically.

The thing I noticed most in my tests were that certain parameters would come up "---", sometimes club face, sometimes spin axis, sometimes launch direction. It didn't happen a lot, but it stood out to me as something different. Spin rate seemed to be close to spot on a little better than half the time. The other half the time, it was a 'best estimate' result. 50% accuracy isn't good at all. My tests still show that ball speed and AoA are still dependent on you telling it what club you're using. That doesn't apply for launch angle or club speed. I was hoping they'd magically fix the ball speed issue on this update, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

[Stonebattle]

Here's my most recent method of calibration. I place the unit and template on a pool table. I center the unit in the ES 16 slot on the Template and face it in a direction where there is no lights or reflections. I then place a 24 x16 in T Square with the short end up against the feet of the ES 16 and flat on the table. I then place a 12 x 8 in T Square flat and square up against the long end of the 24 x 16 T Square. I then adjust the position of the ES 16 until the long end of the smaller T Square is aligned with the line that goes through Cal 1 and Cal 2, but maintaining the ES 16 squarely as possible inside the ES 16 slot on the template. This way one can get the calibration alignment dead on. My pool table is bubble flat as is the mount I use for the ES 16.

I got a bit lazy and did not use this method the until the last one, I did not think it could make that much difference, but I may be wrong. My unit is now back on track to where it was for FW 156, including that irritating 2 to 3 degree right bias. The distances and most other parameters seem reasonable so far, so I'll take it.

[RangeRunner]

Wow! That's a lot of behavior to calibrate! I wished I had known that laboratory conditions were required to calibrate correctly!!!

Out of curiosity. How's your spin rate read when you lie to the machine? My observations about it reading spin a little over 50% correctly comes from my lying to the machine. I'll hit a 7 iron and tell the ES I am playing a 2-iron. 50% of the time, spin rates come out in the high 6000's (where it should be---and it gives me hope that there's still a chance for this to be a good unit), the other times its in the mid-2000's (obviously an estimation). This is on good strikes, not fat/thin shots. (I use a Fiberbuilt hitting surface, so fat shots aren't mis-triggered by sound.) Do you find anything similar to this?

[Stonebattle]

I also find spin is reasonable for the club I actually hit vs the one I chose in the software, at least for clean strikes. I have not been hiting one club and chosing another in the software much of late though.

I took some ball speed measurements with a high speed camera this weekend. For well struck shots the numbers are close to those reported. For fat shots, the reported numbers were often over 30% high. I also hit some three quarter 7 iron shots and the reported results were often over 25% high, even when the ball was struck cleanly.

[Stonebattle]

Well, I tried the above calibration method three times and I get very close to the same results. I know the above method seems over the top, but it seems to work, so I guess I will use it going forward.

[BGCurtis2nd]

RangeRunner Here is the setup I had and as you can see I have a Fiberbuilt hitting surface, I was told that the reason my driver showed so many missed hits was because I was brushing the mat and triggering the ES-16 before impact so they wrote a special software just for me to stop the problem, needless to say it had no effect on what was happening. Calibration should not be that hard of a deal.

[Stonebattle]

I don't know if that over the top calibration method works better or not. I may have just gotten lucky.

[Baller]

I think all this calibration stuff is just nutty now that I have a GcQuad.

Calibration? What’s that? The damn thing should not need to be calibrated. Either it works or it doesn’t. You don’t calibrate any other launch monitor other than the ES16, right?

[RangeRunner]

I've calibrated many a simulator, but don't know of any launch monitors that are user calibrated.

[Jon]

I’d kill for a quad, even a GC2. We have GC2s in our hitting bays at work. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles of some of the LMs that track club data, but it can be relied on for consistently accurate results.

[MainStGolf]

I was told that there was a trial subscription to JNPG, which I also play using my SkyTrak. So, I wanted to see what JNPG was like with the ES16 unit. I have to say there were no delay issues at all with JNPG. So I am still of the opinion that there is something going on between the ES16 and TGC. I did not see a single shot delay while playing with JNPG. The bad part of this story is that I tried to go back and play TGC after I finished with JNPG, and now I can't even get TGC to recognize the ES16. It did take a few moments to get it to register in the ES16 software as well after the JNPG round, but eventually it did. So not sure what is happening there. I'll give it another go on TGC the next time I fire up the computer. Getting ready to head home now. Here is my assessment of the ES16 with JNPG:

I have to say I was wildly impressed with how it performed. Of course my expectations were set just slightly higher than zero after the experience with the ES16 and TGC. I actually made it through 12 holes I think it was without any "major" hiccups. I stopped because I had a 21ft pitch shot that I hit about 7 times and could not get one to read. That was the only one of the day that I could not get any shot to read. There was a HUGE left bias on full wedge shots. Shots that should have been 1-3 degrees left were going 11-14 degrees left. But outside of that just about every shot I hit did what I was expecting it to. There were a couple that went different directions than I thought they would. Numbers were just about spot on with what I have been getting with my SkyTrak. The biggest surprise was the putting. I thought the ES16 handled putting FAR better than the SkyTrak. The 12 stimp on the exhibition tournament round I played truly putted like what I would expect to see out of a 12 stimp. I have not been seeing that with the SkyTrak at all. I was THOROUGHLY impressed as the unit handled all of the putts including the short ones. While I was impressed with what I saw out of the ES16 on JNPG it is still not a unit that is ready for competitive sim play as least as far as I am concerned. Maybe with the new fixes that are supposedly coming that will allow this unit to make it to an acceptable level. With that being said if an ES16 owner needed to use it to play on JNPG I think that could probably happen although I would be nervous getting a 15-30ft pitch/chip shot to read at all much less being able to keep it close. I did not have to switch clubs either and all the shots read with distances I would have expected to get with the clubs that I hit during my testing.

[BGCurtis2nd]

Is that with the newest update?

[MainStGolf]

It was even reading soft putts. I was shocked. Yes it was with the most recent update. I believe I had everything with JNPG closed, but it's possible I didn't. I can't remember if I tried a system reboot or not.

[MainStGolf]

I downloaded the latest FW 158 and seems to have taken care of the lag issues. I only got to play two holes and didn't have a single lag shot, and TGC loaded quickly like it used to with the SkyTrak. Only had to hit two shots to get a 7 yd chip to read, so that was nice.

[Stonebattle]

I updated yesterday to FW 158. I can't see much difference between this update and FW 156. I calibrated twice to get it to perform more as expected.
I still have the 2 to 3 degree right bias I saw with FW 156, so for me no improvement there.
I do not have any issues getting chips to read, although I don't think I tried any inside about 25 ft.
Putting for me seems about the same as in FW156 and I did not have issues with putts inside 10 ft.
I tried hitting a 48.5 degree wedge with wedge selected and 6 iron selected. With the wedge selected the distances were about right, although with the 6 iron selected the distances were about 30 yards to far.
I hit some fat shots today and the unit no read about half, but the half that were read seemed to go the shorter distance I would expect.

[BGCurtis2nd]

I think the new update Joe was saying would be out in a few weeks will make a difference, but I also believe it will take the hardware update he talked about to really show a difference in performance. I am looking forward to see how they work out, my grandson placed 11th in a multi school tournament this past week said he gave out about half way through it. I told him it was because he hasn't been playing any golf, or hitting any balls like we did last year.

[Stonebattle]

I keep recalibrating, but I still am not getting results as reasonable as I have in the past. I know we are hearing they are working on some improvements, but has anyone obtained reasonable results with the unit as it stands now utilizing FW 158? If so, how?

[Stonebattle]

Well, I decided to sell my ES 16. After thinking about it for a while, I began to realize it was not helping my game and that's the main reason I bought it. I had a P3proswing and sold it a couple of years ago. This may come as a surprise to many here, but the P3pro helped my game out a great deal. It is not the best for sim to be sure, still the club data was of significant value at least for me.

For all of those that still own an ES 16, best of luck.

[BGCurtis2nd]

For what it is worth I would recommend the GC2, no big setup, just alien it for the shot, drop your ball down in front of it, or place it on the tee, it will show you if you are in the box or not, then swing. Sticker shock is rough as I am sure you have heard, but there are deals to be found I got a CPO GC2 with the FSX2018 for $45.00 difference than what I paid for my ES-16 alone. Even works outdoors at the range and so far the only shot it missed was way bad on my part and supper fat. I started with a P3Pro just wasn't what I really wanted, then I went to a Golfachiever, which I though helped my game and was a lot of fun but would not run on Windows 10, at any rate I wish you the best of luck.