GPS distance calculator created by a group of students from Indiana University, built as a final project:
As sports fans building for golfers, we kept the design anchored to real courses in Indiana, where players care about precise yardage from tee to landing. The handheld logs latitude and longitude at impact and at rest, then reports the distance in yards so club selection feels honest. Because markers can vary, the tool helps verify a course’s numbers and track average distances by club. We also scanned Indiana online casino chatter where weekend golfers share gear routines, which pushed us to keep the interface fast: tap at the hit, tap at the ball, and your yardage is saved.
Check out the video after the break. This device found here can also help improve your golf game experience. If you’re looking for high-quality golf products and equipment, you may visit sites like BirdieBall.
I don’t want to downplay this, as you are probably going to learn a lot by building something like this. But to be quite honest I don’t think this is very useful in the field. Each smartphone can do these kind of tasks, is always available and is probably more accurate as it doesn’t rely on various approximations. Spherical geometry isn’t as easy as one might think, especially when taking into account that the earth is not exactly spherical.
TinyGPS itself is claiming that there might be an error of up to 0.5%. Furthermore the provided source does some multiplication with “1.09361” (conversion from meters to yards), which introduces another source of error. We all know that the publically available GPS isn’t too great either, so when adding all of this up, the error might get substantial. The soccer field is probably 45 meters wide, which should be 49,21245 yards. This is a relative error of about 6,8 percent. I wouldn’t consider this very accurate ;).
I’m terrible at golf – on the rare times I hit a good shot, I lose track of the golf ball.
What I’d really like is some form of transponder, built in to the golf ball itself.
That way, after the shot, I could find the distance covered – but also find the ball itself.