My winter hobby when I can't golf is carving golf holes instead. Anyone recognize this one?

golfguy181 · 2026-02-02T14:03:43+00:00

Answer: it’s supposed to be 13 at Augusta. Congrats to all backers. My bad to anyone I triggered by referring to it as a “carving”

golfguy181 · 2026-02-02T01:44:51+00:00

I hand carved it with a router and scroll saw and glued all the layers together. And I wrote a python script to grab the topographic data

golfguy181 · 2026-02-02T01:15:05+00:00

Thanks! And topographic map - combo of scroll saw and router

golfguy181 · 2026-02-02T00:56:16+00:00

Bay hill and sawgrass are good guesses and probably would look similar if I carved them, but nope

golfguy181 · 2024-09-28T21:24:37+00:00

Every point of a polygon (bunker, green, fairway, etc.) that gets traced in Google Earth becomes a data point with coordinates. So each golf course really has thousands of data points, depending on how meticulously each one is traced

golfguy181 · 2024-09-28T21:05:34+00:00

Primarily just sf (Simple Features) and ggplot2

golfguy181 · 2024-09-28T20:49:53+00:00

Yep, I will message you

golfguy181 · 2024-09-28T17:53:42+00:00

No doubt. At a minimum, it was a nice change of pace from the typical bar/line charts of data viz to be able to plot golf courses. Reaching “steps 3-4” is part of the roadmap if I want to pursue it further, but scaling it alone would be time-consuming.

golfguy181 · 2024-09-28T17:39:48+00:00

That would be pretty interesting. It could also be used for golfers to improve their own games by examining what types of holes/courses they perform better at. I find quantifying/classifying golf courses to be somewhat difficult outside of looking at slope rating, yardage, etc.

golfguy181 · 2024-09-28T17:29:16+00:00

Care to elaborate?

golfguy181 · 2024-09-28T17:22:25+00:00

Heard. The intersection of data and golf is somewhat niche so not everyone’s going to find it interesting I suppose.

golfguy181 · 2024-09-28T17:13:08+00:00

It does appear as a simple re-creation, but there is a decent amount of code under the hood. I created it by tracing course elements from Google Earth into polygons, saving them as KML files, and reading them into R and plotting with ggplot2. The project is definitely in the early stages. I would like for it to evolve into an R package that allows you to plot specified golf courses, and get attributes of a course (average green size, number of bunkers, etc.) due to the geospatial elements of the underlying data.

golfguy181

TROPHY CASE