Consumer Portable Golf Game
The hardware for this project was a battery operated device that recorded the GPS position of a golfer on a golf course and uses a variety of sensors to detect when the user made a golf shot. After the game, the user can review his or her game on the web and see what club they used along with the distance that the shot traveled. There were rumors that President Obama was spotted using the device while playing golf on Martha’s Vineyard!

The device recorded GPS position data, 3 axis accelerometer, 3 axis compass and 3 axis gyroscope during a game for later analysis. With so much data available, my task was to create a lossless compression algorithm that would reduce the amount of space that the data required for storage and transmission. The algorithm I created compressed the data by an order of magnitude, increasing the devices ability to store data from 1 hour to 10 hours, and decreased downloading time by a factor of 10.

Keywords: GPS, Sensors, ARM, Compression Algorithms, Golf