Wasp Barcode Technologies: The Barcode Solution People

Top Golf and RFID

I love working for System ID. We truly have the best people! Our sales manager, Paul Bowman, shows his staff and the teams who support them appreciation over and over again. Each quarter, he hosts an awards night. No, it’s not getting all dressed up in clothes that you can’t breathe in and shoes you can’t wait to take off… It’s always held somewhere fun. For our 3rd Quarter Sales Awards night, we went to Top Golf in Allen, Texas. Top Golf is an entertainment complex, with food, beverage, and games. It’s sort of like bowling, or darts, but with a golf ball and clubs. We all had a lot of fun eating, drinking and being merry, but as a breek©, I was intrigued. I kept wondering, how does this work? Their technology is a closely guarded secret, but we think it is RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). RFID technology uses an RFID chip attached to an antenna that sends RF waves back to a reader. You basically have 11 targets 25 to 250 feet away, which all have readers that detect the RFID chip embedded in the golf balls. You hit your golf ball to try and get points. Your name is linked to each golf ball in your bucket. Either they encode the balls with each new player’s name or each ball has a unique ID number that is linked to your name. The RFID reader at the target captures the data on the ball’s RFID chip and sends a score to a screen based on the accuracy and distance of each shot. Pretty cool way to use RFID technology if you ask me. For someone like me who is, shall we say, not so athletically inclined, it was still a lot of fun. I actually came in second on my team, and that’s from someone whose idea of a sport is chasing my dog to get the sock, stick, my daughter’s toy, tissue, etc. out of her mouth before having to make a trip to the emergency vet.