My home climbing wall reset with LED system
I started the planning of my home climbing wall reset in November 2024, tested the WS2811 LEDs with a Raspberry Pi 5 via SPI in December 2024 and drilled the holes for the LED system in February 2025. From then on, however, it still took me eight months to complete the entire project. But now I've finished my home climbing wall LED system project and I couldn't be happier with the result.
New wooden climbing holds
I'm slowly starting to feel like buying climbing holds might have become an addiction for me. I wanted to buy a few new wooden holds for the reset. After a few years of training on my own climbing wall, I now have a better understanding of what is important to me when it comes to holds. Years ago, I focused more on crazy shapes, unusual gluing techniques, and appearance. But my tastes and requirements have changed a little. Appearance is not entirely unimportant, but now I prefer simpler shapes. Therefore, I mostly just bought new crimps in various depths.
Jim Boughen
Jim Boughen is a wooden hold shaper from the UK. You might know him from the WEDGE CLIMBING video The Art of Making Wooden Climbing Holds or Board Training on Custom Shaped Climbing Holds. I purchased two pairs of wooden climbing holds from Jim. And the finish on the holds is truly flawless.
TaylorMadeHolds
TaylorMadeHolds is a North Wales based climbing hold company built and founded by James Taylor. James' climbing holds are more visually striking. There is a very good selection of beautiful basic holds, but every few weeks James produces climbing holds made from special woods. And these are often sold out within minutes. I was lucky enough to get my hands on two pairs of crimps.
Incognito Holds
Incognito Holds is a wooden hold shaping company by Jacoby Georges from Vienna in Austria. I immediately liked the simple shapes made from the most beautiful wood. I bought three pairs of climbing holds here.
Pappa Woods
At Pappa Woods shop, you can actually order climbing holds that are completely customized to your own specifications. You can choose from many different shapes for edges, pinches, or jugs. Then you can decide how much undercut you want on the hold, how thick you want it to be, and which of the seven different hardwoods you want it to be made from. The holds are then produced at a really fair price in one of my favorite climbing areas, the Frankenjura. At present, the founder, Sebastian Becher, appears to have entered into a joint venture with Alexander Megos, called Megos & Woods.
Bloc Cartel Holds
For a long time, I resisted buying holds from Bloc Cartel Holds. I thought it was ridiculous to order wooden climbing holds from the other side of the world, in Australia. But when I saw the two pairs of climbing holds on my smartphone during a climbing trip to Arco in September, I couldn't resist any longer. And it was worth it. The wood of both holds seems absurdly hard to me, almost like rock, but still warm like wood. And the finish is breathtaking. In the video Shaping Wooden Climbing Holds with Bloc Cartel you can see how Murray is running his workshop.
New symmetric hold layout
This step was actually the one I was most afraid of. A new symmetrical climbing hold layout, which I hope will give me a few years of enjoyment. However, doing everything right tended to block me. So at some point, I just started and accepted that I would make mistakes again. That there would be climbing holds that were poorly positioned again. If I notice such mistakes in the future, I will simply make small changes to the layout in a few months. I can still adjust the problems that have arisen up to that point.
The biggest difference to the previous layout is the grid in which the climbing holds are now arranged. For me, it wasn't a problem if climbing holds sometimes ended up in the neighbor's area. You just have to place smaller holds next to the larger ones. This is actually intentional, so that you have a different selection of climbing holds in each area of the climbing wall.
However, I must admit that the grid arrangement with the resulting spacing is not as aesthetically pleasing as a free climbing hold arrangement. In my opinion, however, this is an acceptable disadvantage to take in order to enjoy the advantages of an LED system. The alternative would be a free climbing hold arrangement with an LED system, as often made by Digital Training Boards in commercial gyms. However, this would make rearranging the climbing holds almost unthinkable in the future.
Climbing board LED system
Remembering the climbing problems on my home climbing wall was often a real motivation killer in the past. Of course, this was often due to the footholds, as these are always a specific part of the problem for me and I simply have too many of them. In any case, switching between two problems on the climbing wall was not always as smooth for my brain as I would have liked. I have described another possible solution in Marking routes on a home climbing wall with magnets. That was a nice solution, but not quite as convenient as an LED system.
Already existing LED systems
There aren't many, but there are a few LED system solutions on the market for non-standard home climbing walls. And of course, I looked at these before building my own solution. Because I'm actually a big fan of using well-established products instead of making them by myself in poor quality. There's no need to reinvent the wheel every time. However, as I am a software developer with a preference for open source, I have a problem with buying a product that I cannot control or repair myself. Unfortunately, this excluded manufacturers such as Digital Training Boards and FlexBoard. Other manufacturers do not seem to be really intended for home use, such as Stōkt or Clift. Of the open source solutions, I would like to mention PeggyBoard as inspiration. However, I was somewhat put off by the implementation here. And I saw problems with adding new features to the software in the future.
owoody - Open Source Woody
I have now written a small web app based on Symfony myself. I named it owoody. The app runs as a web server in my home network on a Raspberry Pi 5, which controls the LEDs via SPI. Currently, it can't do very much yet. You can create climbing problems and display them. An important feature for me was that you can display the mirrored version of a climbing problem. Here is one of my first problems in the app and on the climbing wall.
Future development
Currently, owoody is still very rudimentary. It's more of a proof of concept. There isn't even a README.md yet. But of course, I want to improve the quality to ensure the longevity of my wall. At the moment, the web app is still quite tailored to my symmetrical grid wall. I am happy to make the software more flexible so that it can be more useful to other users. The features I am currently planning are.
- Adjustable angle with different grading depending on the angle
- Logging of accents with a user management
- Uploading of wall or board image
- Free hold layouts
- Circle problems
Please let me know if you are interested in using owoody, and I will be happy to help you get started.