As part of a final year Uni project I recently developed a golf ball tracking system using GPS technology. Details about my project can be found at http://murray.newcastle.edu.au/users/students/2004/c9906161/. In brief, I created a device small enough to fit inside of a golf ball, capable of continuously tracking it to accuracies down to 1m.
This thread is not however a plug for my project. Rather, I have been organising my thoughts lately and I figured that the device could potentially be applied to solve the board leash / no leash problem: imagine a waterproof device, smaller and lighter than a golf ball, which could be attached to your board meaning that if it disappeared it could be easily found. A typical use case would be:
1. You lose your board; 2. You body drag back to your starting point and grab the PDA (personal digital assistant) out of your car; 3. It tells you how far away your board is, and in which direction; 4. If it is close and you can see it, you could swim and get it - otherwise you could find the nearest boat and, taking your PDA with you, hone in on your board.
Currently the device has a range of about 500m (line of sight). The question is: would this kind of system be useful?
justin what are you doin hush hush go get a patent if you can it is the bomb, thing is i reakon the price of it will be a problem, that and range. $500 big ones would be as much as i could spot even that is a stretch. I have been thinking about a much cheaper device and i am sure there are little inventers out there with some groovy ideas. I reakon your drama is system cost; you get get it under 500, maybe under 250 to grab the masses. Knew board cost around 1000 or if you have connections 500. The old 100% mark up from importers to retailers always amazes me.
You would need a PDA (they are relatively cheap these days, around $500). This would obviously be useful for more than just finding your board. On top of this though, I reckon the cost would come out at no more than $200 (production quantities) for the device itself, the receiver to plug into the PDA, and the software.
On top of this, the device could be used to draw a map of exactly where you boarded – the distance, the max speed etc. Battery life wouldn’t be an issue as the device could be recharged after each session (say 2-3 hours).
Come to think of it, although the GPS accuracy is lower in this respect, it also has the capability to measure altitude above sea level.
Thanks for the interest all, keep the responses coming. At this stage I have a device that is 90% complete in terms of technical development – really all I need to do is build a waterproof case.
I am keen to build around 25 – 50 of the devices to sell to see how they go. The main problem here is that in such low quantities all of the components are really expensive. I guess I would sell them at break even price only just to see how they go.
Bondo at the moment I am using GPS receiving software written by Motorola (which isn’t open source). I plan to write my own for this application, and as yet I am not sure whether or not it will be open source. There wouldn’t be a great deal of use making it open source though, as the majority of it would be very hardware specific (to my device) and low level.
Once I have finished the first one I will let you all know exactly how high Justin from Newcastle can really jump.
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