Planning my home climbing wall reset with Inkscape
My adjustable home climbing wall is now three and a half years old. I made once a smaller and once a bigger upgrade. And next year I would like to do a reset. The main reason for the reset is my need for LED support when memorizing routes. I would like to show how I will plan the reset with the help of Inkscape.
The boundary conditions
My initial wall was planned with a grid layout in mind. I have a 15 cm grid layout with 17 columns and 15 rows on the main board. Plus a kicker board. At the beginning I also tried to get only wooden climbing holds with M10 bolt holes. However, as this has already significantly limited the choice, I have also bought holds that are only attached with screws. Then we also deviated from the grid in the initial layout.
Grid layout
In my opinion, the upcoming LED system forces a grid layout. There would of course be the option of arranging the holds in a wild arrangement again and then adapting the LED system to the layout. But that would mean that I would never be able to repopulate the entire wall again. Or if I could, it would be very limited. Digital Training Boards does this in commercial bouldering halls. I will therefore adapt the holes for my LED system to the grid. There will be one LED hole for each bolt hole. Just like the moonboard does.
Symmetrical layout
I will stick to the symmetrical layout. In my opinion, it's perfect for training imbalances. Besides, I already have all the holds in symmetrical pairs.
The current layout
On the following picture you can see the current home climbing wall layout.
Inkscape Grid
I did the following steps in Inkscape to create a grid that supports me on my planning.
- Pasted the image of the layout into a new Inkscape document. I made sure that the picture of the climbing wall has been made as accurately as possible from the front.
- Set the opacity of the picture to 50%.
- Draw a rectangle above the main panel of the climbing wall.
- Set the width and height of the document to the size of the rectangle. In my case it was 983.24506px for the width and 902.31494px for the heigth.
- I calculated the px per cm ratio by dividing 983.24506 px by 260 cm. The 260cm is the original width of the board. The result has been 3.781711769 px/cm.
- My grid is 15 cm by 15 cm with a 2.5 cm padding on the top, left and right border. So I adjusted the Origin X and Origin Y of the Inkscape grid to 9,45 px. That is approximately the result of 3.781711769 px/cm times 2.5 cm. The Spacing X and Spacing Y have been adjusted to 56.73 px. The approximately result of 3.781711769 px/cm times 15 cm.
Adding the holds
Afterwards I selected every hold on its own with GIMP and pasted it into Inkscape document. I grouped every hold with a square on the grid. The result can also be downloaded as layout.svg. I can now use this file to plan my reset.
