Mobile Mini Green Recreates Coeur D’Alene’s Floating 14th Hole

December 28, 2015 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

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.

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Table Golf

December 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

table-golf

This could be the dawning of a new hackerspace sport. [Antoni Kaniowski] and [Rohit Sharma] came up with a delightful game of desktop golf. But the control scheme has a decidedly geeky flair. They’re using salvaged parts from an audio device and a hard drive to control the swing of the mechanical golfer just out of focus in the background of this image.

The game was built for a class project at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. Originally they wanted to have haptic feedback which would help you learn to tailor each shot for a perfect game. This proved to be impossible with the hardware they had on hand, but as you can see from the clip after the break the system still turned out just great. The audio slide which is taped to the underside of the table adjust the swing velocity. The hunk of hardware from an old hard drive acts the trigger for the swing.

The ‘hole’ is a laser cut ring of plywood. We’d love to see complicated courses designed in CAD and meticulously assembled for competition… but maybe we’re just getting carried away.

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