Hacking Impact Video and Ball Location Out of the Square Omni

The Square Omni keeps a lot of data to itself — but with a bit of tinkering, that data can be coaxed out over USB. In a follow-up to his popular USB video-capture short, Danny walks through the second half of a companion app he's building: real-time visual ball location plus impact video playback.

The idea is simple. When you're playing through third-party software like GS Pro, you lose the sense of exactly where the ball sits in your hitting area. This utility puts that context back on screen, showing you in real time whether the ball is inside the zone where the Omni actually captures club data.

Square Omni Launch Monitor

Knowing When You're in the Capture Zone

The Square Omni only measures club data in the forward half of the hitting area, and it's easy to drift outside that window without realizing it. The companion app solves this with a live alignment diagram.

Move the ball around and the app reacts instantly. If it's just outside the capture area, you'll see "found outside the zone" — the camera sees the ball, but it won't register a proper reading. Slide the ball into the correct area and the indicator locks on in green.

The layout can be reoriented too. Keep it on a monitor in front of you for a Garmin R50-style alignment view, or tuck it into the corner of your projector screen. Switching the orientation to "front" makes the diagram intuitive when you're hitting toward the screen rather than reading it from the side.

Pulling Impact Video Over USB

The more ambitious feature is impact video. The Omni's vision system is made up of four IR cameras — two for launch data (the R1 system) and two for spin (the R2 system). The device captures individual still frames during each shot, uses them to compute speed and spin, then wipes them on the next shot.

Danny's app grabs those frames before they disappear and stitches them into a video, plus a time-lapse composite image with every frame overlaid. Right now he's pulling from a single launch camera to keep things manageable.

A single shot's worth of frames is roughly a 60–90 megabyte payload. Even over USB 2.0, that's about 10 to 12 seconds per shot — or up to 45 seconds if you pull all the camera data.

That bandwidth ceiling explains why Square never built this in. The unit is capped to USB 2.0 speeds and doesn't have fast Bluetooth, so transferring frame data wirelessly would take minutes per shot — a total non-starter. Over USB it's slow but workable, and Danny reckons he can trim the window of meaningful footage to cut the wait down further.

What It Takes to Run It

This isn't a plug-and-play affair, and Danny is upfront about the barriers. There are a few things standing in the way of a wider release:

• You have to peel off a sticker that Square clearly placed over the ports intentionally — it may or may not void your warranty.
• The stand covers the two USB ports by design, so you need something like Danny's quick-and-dirty 3D-printed stand to reach them.
• You need to be comfortable on your PC's command line to run the local capture software.
• For full camera data you connect both USB ports; for a single camera, one port will do.

A viewer, Packer's Corner, has already replicated the impact-video trick on the Square Home Edition, which suggests the approach carries across the product line. Danny plans to test the Home Edition himself once his loaner unit returns.

The Firmware Wildcard

The biggest unknown is Square itself. A firmware update won't brick the device, but it could break compatibility with the app — or lock the interface down completely. Danny is watching how the internals shift between firmware versions and openly hoping Square leaves the door unlocked.

For now this remains a passion project. If he can get it to a point where it's safe and easy to work with, he'll consider releasing it more widely. He's also crediting Claude Code with doing much of the heavy lifting exploring the device's interface.