Short chips on e6

[Tekbud]

I wanted to start a thread that is specific to the problems with chipping on e6 in the hopes that this is being looked at by skytrak and trugolf and any other sim software coming down the pike. For me, any shot of about 20 feet or less that is on the fringe or rough is completely unplayable. If a pin is tucked near the edge of the green you are forced to play away from it. It's basically a hazard and a penalty stroke. Yesterday I hit a nearly perfect 2nd shot into hole 1 with the pin up front. Ended up 10 feet away, but inches into the fringe for eagle. Desperate to figure out a way to hit this shot the proper speed or even in the hole (gasp a straight 10 footer) I tried all the tricks. I hit a Putt hard, a hooded 8 iron, put the ball varying inches behind the red dot. Nothing would register. Finally gave up and progressively started hitting a chip harder and harder until it would register. 26 feet past the hole later I'm missing a birdie Putt and making par. E6/skytrak this is a deal breaker for any sim that I would pay for. Praying this is e6 and not skytrak and just a beta issue. I for one won't be buying any of these sims until glaring issues like this one are resolved.

On a side note I was playing with my 8 year old son yesterday and he had a chip of about 50 feet on flat green. He hit it way to easy but he did hit it solid, my guess about 15 feet. However it hit the green about 8 feet away and then spun back off the green. So my guess is something is way off with spin on very short chips that is causing no reads and this weird behavior. Or else he has some incredible grooves in his wedge lol.

If anyone has had any success or any tricks with these shots pleas post a reply. Thanks all.

[davray666]

I have not updated my ST firmware yet because I don't want to loose the range app functionality since I have no GIP subscription.
See no reason to pay for it until there's sim support available.
So I can't test this but you could.
If you go to the ST range and try those soft 20ft, 10ft or even 5ft chips. Will they register and does the reported distance and direction seam reasonable?
To me that would indicate if the problem is with E6 or ST.

[Willymakit]

I can confirm this exactly thing has happened. Just on the fridge trying to chip to the hole and going by 16 feet and into the rough on the other side of hole. Chipped it back and off the green again. It was like army golf. Back and forth. I tried everything also from using a different iron to different techniques of chipping and I couldn't get it any where close to the pin. After 15-20 minutes of this non sense I picked the ball up. This happened 3 times in a round. Since then I been turned off of playing e6.

[luv2golf]

I haven't used the skytrak range app in a long time, just using the E6 range.

I'll try this weekend to see if I can chip short shots on the range app.

Willymakit, didn't you sell your skytrak?

[Willymakit]

Yes I did this week. Looking for a gc2.

[Dax]

When you are on the fringe are you not able to manually select putter?

[wilson]

I've not seen any option to tell E6 what type of stroke you are playing.

[luv2golf]

No You Can't.

[wilson]

Same here. Anything close to an edge and less than 15 feet is unplayable. Seems you need a 20 yard minimum whack.

[luv2golf]

Here's my experience:

20 feet and under - take an 8 or 9 iron and play a bump and run, anything lower than a 9 iron gives you 10K plus spin and puts you further back than it was to begin with.

FLOP Shots - I use a short tee and place it 1" in front of the laser (towards the screen) and then hit under it (like it would be sitting up in the rough), This works about 70% of the time.

This part of the game is the most frustrating. I have a buddy over last weekend playing, he was thinking about a skytrak (price point) and with the chipping issues, he decided to pass.

Not sure why a putter can't be manually selected.................makes no sense.

[davray666]

We need Skytrak to come clean and tell us what they have done to improve putting and chipping and how it works.
Me personally I would accept that the HLA is so bad that they decided to always report all puts as straight.
Sim game play can still be fun if the speed is somewhat accurate. If not, then they should come clean and tell people that the ST unit is great for practice but not suitable for Simulators.

More than 2 years ago I designed a LM that uses the same image sensors that ST uses. I abandoned it because I was not able to achieve GC2 level accuracy on 30 yards and below chips. The putting was just as accurate as GC2. But my trig and image capture was much more advanced than the one ST uses. So technically the ST unit could be programmed to do putting and slow chipping well if the sim tells it that is what's about to happen.
Question is have they done that and if they even know how to do it?

[wilson]

Then partnering with all these content creators would be a disaster. I don't believe that. He's always maintained that it's very very precise for all forms of use.

[Chughes82]

Yeah, I saw that post too. Seemed like nonsense.

[luv2golf]

I guess I must of missed that post by SkyTrak_Seth. I hope that's not true, I bought a skytrak for winter sim use and summer range use. Oh well, 11am tee time today, so it's not that dire yet.

[Shardak]

When you run E6, there is a command prompt that runs that appears to be the API between Skytrak and E6. Every time you hit a shot, if you alt-tab out of E6 and look at the command window, it will show you the raw shot data.

I have noticed on these short chips, that there is an error message shown instead of shot data. It says something like "Shot confidence too low..ignoring shot". Cant remember the exact error, but its something like that. It clearly reads that a shot has occurred, since the red laser turns off for a second. But something in the data must not be good for short chips, so E6 discards it and you have to hit another.

The question is whether that type of error is coming from Skytrak or E6. I think testing this on the Skytrak range is a good idea.

[JV17]

This is clearly a ST issue. I have no problems with these types of chips using e6 and the GC2.

[doublebogey]

Your comment just made more ST owners who passed on summer's $3k used GC2's even more depressed...

[doublebogey]

Your comment just made more ST owners who passed on summer's $3k used GC2's even more depressed...

[luv2golf]

This is clearly a ST issue. I have no problems with these types of chips using e6 and the GC2.

Not necessarily true JV17, skytrak and E6 is beta still, E6 and GC2 is in full release supported by foresight.

Has anyone tested on the skytrak range short chips under 20 feet? Just curious before we all start throwing our skytraks in the garbage because of what some people "think".

Let's see if SkyTrak_Seth, can clarify this for us.

[SkyTrak_Seth]

I'm confused...what happens on the SkyTrak range when you hit your short chips? It flies?

TruGolf uses their own flight model based on our data. Maybe they have a threshold set...

[luv2golf]

SkyTrak_Seth, I haven't tested short chips on the range. no incentive to do so.

I can only say that on e6 they don't register.

[Tekbud]

Below Shardak tested this thoroughly and the same problem exists on the Skytrak app as well.

[JV17]

luv2golf, you're right... It must be the e6 software. Good luck man. And by the way, Foresight doesn't support e6, or TGC connectivity, or any other software other than their own to be used with GC2.

[luv2golf]

JV17. my bad, I thought E6 was supported by foresight. Thought it was a USB connection and not a hacked bluetooth connection.

What's up with the "good luck man"?

[Stiggity]

What about any of the beta testers chipping in (no pun intended) for TGC and e6 that can comment on how putting and chipping are. Able to put from fringe etc? Bubba22

[Bubba22]

TGC you can putt from anywhere. The trigger to putt is dependent on the club selected. With E6 putting is triggered when on the green so you can't putt from the fringe.

[Tekbud]

Can you chip from the fringe or rough inside 20 feet on TGC?

[Bubba22]

Yes you can. Very, very soft chips get picked up with Skytrak and TGC. Not the case with E6.

[Tekbud]

This is very surprising and very good news for the future of ST. I was afraid for the worst... Tonight I experimented on the e6 practice green and the shortest I can hit a chip is 20 feet. It's like there is a hard limit set there that is simply unbreakable. At least I know what the low number is... Bump 8-iron to 20 feet on flat ground only

[Shardak]

I just did some short chip testing in both Skytrak app and E6 range. I hit about 50 chips in both apps.

The minimum ball speed that Skytrak can reliably read is 15 MPH. I was able to get a few 13-14 MPH chips to register, but it was like a 10% success rate. At 15 MPH and above, things seemed to register OK. This certainly appears to be a skytrak hardware issue. I highly doubt this is something we will see a fix for. Its likely a limitation of the hardware.

The shortest chip I could hit was about 15 feet carry, 20 feet total distance.

Shots hit close to the 15mph ball speed threshold are picked up better when sitting about 1-2 inches behind the red laser.

Both E6 and skytrak ranges were reporting the same speeds and carry distances, but E6 seemed to give alot more roll-out than Skytrak. 15 foot carrys in E6 would roll out to 25 feet. Skytrak rolled out alot less, it may just be down to rounding differences between the apps.

My Skytrak data is attached. This data is a mix of 60 degree, 56 degree, PW and 8 iron shots...all trying to hit 15 MPH or less ball speed.

This is a bit of a bummer for simulation purposes. For practice, it doesnt really matter as I dont think you can get alot of benefit from practicing chips like this on a sim. You need a real green and a real cup to aim at to really improve.

[davray666]

That is a very good summary that highlights the problem with some hard cold facts.
What you could do in addition is run a test on those 20 - 30ft chips and asses how accurate they are in terms of VLA & HLA and if they register consistently. If you are hitting in to a screen it's easy to se where the ball hits the screen for those slow balls. You can mark the screen with some black tape to show you each 2 deg vertical and horizontal angle separation to make it easier to spot the angle.
I have done this with the old firmware. The result is not very pretty and would be totally useless for a simulator.

[arwin]

I was testing shorter chips with my skytrak range app and I could only hit short chips to 15 yards, which would be about 45 feet. However, I did not try the trick of moving the ball behind the laser
Anything shorter for me, the ST would not register it.

[Bubba22]

With Skytrak and TGC you can hit soft chips as low as a few feet.

[Sascha1818]

Bubba just a quick question. What is a soft chip ? You mentioned in you two posts that you can hit soft chips which leads me to thinking there is a hard chip ST doesn't read.