Drilling holes for the LED system of my home climbing wall
Things are getting serious. I bought 6 x 50 12 volt addressable WS2811 LED chains and tested how I can control them from a Raspberry PI 5. Now it's time to drill the holes for the LEDs in the wall. This step should be carefully considered, as I could destroy the climbing wall in the long term.
LED hole postiion
I have given a lot of thought to the position of the LED hole in relation to the T-Nut hole. There are of course different approaches here. I have already explained in Planning my home climbing wall reset with Inkscape why I prefer a grid layout and why I think there is no alternative. This means that the LED holes will be at a certain regular distance from the T-Nut holes. The options are actually top above, bottom below, left or right. And of course a mixture of these options.
Mini MoonBoard metrics
On the Mini Moonboard, for example, the LED holes are exactly 80 mm below the hold holes. With a hold spacing of 200 mm.
Finding the right LED position
The distance between my T-Nut holes is 150 mm. I therefore have the option of positioning my LED holes up to a maximum of 75 mm above, below or to the left or right of the T-Nuts. I generally prefer the LED holes under the T-Nut holes. Now the question is at what distance?
Climbing holds cover LED hole
With my stock of climbing holds, it will be unavoidable that climbing holds will cover the hole from the LED. Regardless of where I want to position the hole for the LED. However, I think with a downward clearance of 60 mm, this problem will occur as rarely as possible. I will show you how I want to solve the problem with climbing holds that cover the LED holes in another post.
Boundary condition substructure
Actually, the article could be over at this point and I'll just carry on happily. However, I have the problem that not all areas of my climbing wall are fully accessible from behind. There is a 10 x 10 cm thick beam of construction timber at the top, left and right. Drilling several holes through the construction timber to attach LEDs to the wall from behind is not an option.
The naive approach
The red rectangles in the following picture show the places where there are beams behind the wall. I can't drill holes for LEDs in these places. The black circles are the T-Nut holes. The blue circles symbolize the places where an LED would be if I simply placed it 60 mm below the T-Nuts. As you can see, this simple approach doesn't work at all on the kickboard.
The more advanced approach
So I have to move the holes at the outermost gaps inwards. If I only do this with these columns, it will look irregular. I therefore move the holes at the outermost gaps inwards by 20 mm. And with each additional column, this shift decreases by 2.5 mm. So that there is no shift at the middle column again. In the kicker, I also had to compress the LED holes properly and the 60 mm rule does not apply here.
