Golf is an expensive obsession for some, with course fees on the most memorable and challenging courses running into the hundreds of dollars a game and beyond. If playing one of the most unusual holes in golf is simply beyond your means, there’s no need to fret – just do what [TVMiller] did and build a miniature mobile replica of the famous Coeur d’Alene Resort Floating 14th hole.
The Floating 14th is pretty spectacular as far as golf holes go. With a green located on an island about a hundred yards offshore of beautiful Lake Coeur d’Alene in northern Idaho, there’s little room for error – after all, it’s surrounded by a 49 square mile water trap. [TVMiller]’s replica green recreates the target quite accurately, although we doubt the Jolly Wrencher flag is regulation for championship play. But the best part is the motorized platform and smartphone app that can be used to send the mini green out as far as you feel like practicing. Sure, it could be a tad more realistic if the replica green actually floated, but asphalt fairways are a little easier to come by than Olympic-sized swimming pools.
A fun, tongue-in-cheek project, and we really enjoyed the faux TV coverage of the 2015 Hackaday Golf Championship in the video below. If real golf isn’t your thing, you might want to build a table-top golf course, or play a round of mini golf with a ball-incinerating Portal themed hole.
Heh; making golf shots down a lane at a storage facility is small potatoes. Here in the rural Kansas small town the owner of a service station practices his golf shots teeing of from a grass island across a State highway into the yard of an oil field services company.
That’s yer fancy livin’ right there
“Golf is a good walk spoiled.” (probably) Mark Twain.
“Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.”
Jim Bishop
Bucketlist:
√ see hometown on hackaday
Kinda me too – CdA is my next hometown! Spent the month of October at a rental on the lake, right next to the Tubb’s Hill trailhead. I could see the Floating 14th from my front yard. Absolutely loved it, can’t wait to come back permanently.
So does it float, or is it an island?
Pretty sure the “floating” thing is marketing. Looks more like an artificial island. Pretty cool still. Once you get on the green – the spot you if you can’t make it in two strokes – you take an electric boat out to the island to finish the hole.
It does float on pontoons they built it upon. The bigger thing is it’s adjustable thus the theme for the project above. 2 huge cables on wenches in side the island are controlled from a panel which I duplicated for the app. You can see a screen shot on the hackaday.io page for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7amdWpYSIk
Shame on cynical me. I stand happily corrected – now that’s a hack!
Don’t know if you play golf but if you do, the setting on the real green goes from 100 to 259. Can you imagine a 259 all water carry hole?!
No, I don’t play golf. All my golf course activities were contained to the misspent days of my youth and were decidedly non-regulation. But I have derped around at driving ranges, and the ability to hit that ball accurately over those distances has always amazed me. Doing so over that much open water has got to be intimidating.