Reading your start line, and what to expect from pre-orders
Last week I told you we were rebuilding how the gate reads the line of your putt, and that I thought the drift we were chasing could be fixed in firmware. This week it landed, and the result is better than I hoped.
We have now assembled three gates for testing. This week we rolled hundreds of putts through them on our test rig, which delivers a ball at a known angle so there is a true answer to check against. All three gates read within a tenth of a degree of true zero. Not after hand tuning. Straight off the bench.
The part I did not expect: the three gates agree with each other so closely that we deleted the per-unit calibration step entirely. We had built a whole calibration process on the assumption that every unit would need its own correction dialed in. The data said the correction was doing more harm than good, because the units already match and the thing we were "correcting" was mostly our own test fixture wobbling day to day. So now, instead of calibrating each gate, we make each gate prove itself: 25 putts on the rig, and if the average is not within a tenth of a degree of dead straight, it does not ship.
That test earned its keep on its very first production run. The first gate we put through it failed. Turned out the gate was fine, the ramp was seated wrong in the fixture, and the test was sharp enough to catch a fraction of a degree of misaim in our own setup. Re-seated it, ran it again, passed. That is exactly the kind of failure I want: the one that happens on my bench instead of your living room.
GSPro
Thank you to everyone who replied offering to test the GSPro connector. There were a lot of you, and I have been sending setup instructions out one launch monitor at a time.
The honest status: it is messier than we envisioned. Every launch monitor speaks its own language, and the open source connector we built on reads most of them by literally watching the screen and reading the numbers off it, which works but is error prone. Some monitors will behave well, some will take real work, and a few may not make sense to support.
We are dedicated to making LagKing play nicely with GSPro however we can. Some of it is simply out of our control, because it comes down to how GSPro accepts inputs. But between the testers who volunteered and the work so far, I like where this is heading, and I will keep reporting honestly as monitors move from "should work" to "confirmed working."
What else happened this week
Less glamorous, just as important. We spent the week on the unglamorous side of making physical things: working with our suppliers, building out the assembly stations, and printing test cases in different settings and colors to lock the finish. Sixty battery packs are on their way. Shelving went up. It looks less like a lab and more like a small factory every day.
We have also started conversations with companies that can eventually take over building these, so that assembly stops depending on the two of us and a workbench. That is a longer road, but it started this week.
And there is one more thing in the workshop that I am not ready to talk about yet. It is not the gate and it is not the app. I think you are going to like it.
Some honesty about the Founder Edition
There are now over a thousand of you on this list. There will be 50 Founder Edition units. I want to be straight about what that means.
The first 50 are for people who want to help make this thing great: early adopters who will put real putts through it, tell us what is wrong, and accept some bugs and rough edges in exchange for being first. If you want a polished, boring, everything-just-works product, the second batch will be the better buy, and I say that with love for the first one.
Pre-orders open once we pass FCC testing, for the countries we pass it in. That is the US for certain, hopefully Canada as well, and other countries will come online in 2027. The first 50 will sell out quickly. We will leave pre-orders open past that for a second batch, which will likely ship in December.
I know the gap between demand and what we can build right now is big. Closing it is the thing we are working on most urgently, and it is why the manufacturing conversations above matter. This lag is a launch problem, not a forever problem.
Thank you
The last two weeks have been the biggest this list has ever had, and almost all of it came from people sharing the videos with a friend. If the reels made you think of a golf buddy who three putts too much, send one along.
And keep the replies coming. The test rig, the connector work, and at least two app features exist because somebody answered one of these emails. Tell me what you would want your first week with the gate to look like.