On-course cart & kitchen display
How an order travels from a golf cart on the course to the right prep station in the kitchen — the LoRa link, the cart screen and the kitchen display.
The on-course cart system lets golfers order food and drinks from their cart, follow the round on a live course map, keep score and call for help — all on a club-owned radio link that needs no course wifi. This guide follows an order from the fairway to the flat-top.
The three surfaces
| Surface | Who uses it | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Cart screen | Golfers | Course map, menu, scoring and a distress button. |
| Ops Manager & Cart Orders | Staff | Every cart live on the course map, open orders by how long they’ve waited, cart messages and alerts. |
| Kitchen display (KDS) | Cooks | The live ticket queue for a prep station. |
The link that makes it possible
Communication runs over a long-range LoRa mesh radio — licence-free and club-owned — so ordering, live GPS, scoring and the distress call all ride one link back to the clubhouse. The radio is the network: there is no course-wide wifi to build and no cellular contract to carry, and coverage reaches every corner of the property by design.
Ordering: cart → kitchen
- Order from the cart. A member browses the full menu — photos, prices and every modifier — and sends it in mid-round. A checked-in member sees their favorites for one-tap reordering.
- The clubhouse sees it instantly. The order lands on the Cart Orders screen and the Ops Manager with the cart number and hole attached, so staff know what’s coming and where to run it — the Ops Manager sorts open orders by how long they’ve waited, amber from 10 minutes and red from 20.
- It fires to the kitchen. The order routes to the correct prep station and appears on the kitchen display with every modifier intact — the cooks work it like any other ticket.
Charges post to the member’s account automatically, on the same books as the rest of the club.
The kitchen display
The KDS ships as two touch surfaces that share one backend and a live push channel:
- Cook display — the bump display: a live ticket queue for one station (or the expo), with touch bump / recall and the 86 list.
- Chef / expediter panel — the management surface: the 86 board, line status and whole-ticket bump chips, with the cook display embedded picture-in-picture on single-screen stations.
Interaction is touch-first. A chef’s PIN sign-in on the management panel also unlocks the cook display running in the same browser profile, so one sign-in brings both screens live.
Beyond ordering
The same cart screen also carries:
- GPS & course map — live cart position, hole-by-hole yardages and wayfinding to the clubhouse, next tee or nearest restroom.
- Cart position for the clubhouse — every cart the gateway hears is placed live on the Ops Manager course map, drawn from the course’s own hole-by-hole GPS record. A cart in a GPS shadow keeps its last known spot, and a status bar shows the gateway, radio and data age so a dead link never looks like a quiet course. A starter strip shows the next groups off the tee sheet with one-tap Check in / No-show, and the Carts tab lists the whole enrolled fleet — Available, Out, Charging or Offline — even when idle.
- Pace of play — when a cart on today’s tee sheet reaches the first tee, its group’s round starts and each GPS fix moves it along the holes; groups show On Pace, Behind or Way Behind with minutes. Nothing is sent to golfers automatically: behind groups are listed on the Ops Alerts tab and the starter taps Send pace reminder to text that one cart.
- Live scoring — enter the group’s card as you play; the leaderboard updates over the same link.
- Distress call — one button sends the cart number, hole and GPS position (plus a what3words location when available) to clubhouse staff over the club-owned radio link, with automatic retries — no wifi or cell signal required. The cart shows Received as soon as the clubhouse has the call, and Help is on the way, with the staff member’s name, only when someone presses Acknowledge on the Ops screen. Calls are saved and show on every Ops screen; one left unacknowledged for a minute is escalated once to the club’s alert hook, when one is configured.
For the marketing overview of this system, see the On-Course & Cart feature page.