This week we were able to make a lot of progress with Seaver and Erik returning home from their swim meet. We mainly finalized our design and ordered parts/sensors to begin testing with.
We had a breakthrough this week where we were able to verify that the LiDAR sensor that we got through the ECE inventory was able to successfully detect a golf ball. A few risks still with this component will be reliably detecting the golf ball and the distance to the hole while not becoming confusing by other objects such as the putter or golfers feet.
One change that we have decided to make it to line the putting green with a boundary wall. 
As shown here, the golf holes have barrier walls around them. This will allow us to do two things, first we will be able to embed the LiDAR sensor slightly lower as currently a golf ball passes just under the plane of vision for the sensor. Second, this will allow the LiDAR sensor to begin a calibration phase in which it measures and stores data about the hole with no other objects. This will yield more accurate object detection and distance measurement on the course.
Some of the final items to iron out are how we are building the hole itself, what components will it have, and what materials will we be using. We plan to finalize and begin building sometime mid next week as we want to verify each component of the system first before building the green itself.
Overall we are on track for our project and following the schedule. We should be able to build component prototypes for every subsystem in the entire project by the end of next week putting us well on track to have our plan verified before spring break.