PeggyBoard Illuminates Rock Wall Climbing Routes

Home rock climbing walls are popular for enthusiasts of the sport, especially in the aftermath of COVID with many climbing gyms closing down. Building a DIY climbing wall isn't a trivial undertaking, but it is possible for motivated climbers with some experience using power tools. However, the climbing routes can quickly grow stale and there is a lot of benefit to mixing things up. To facilitate that, Pegor designed PeggyBoard to illuminate climbing routes.

A typical DIY climbing wall will have a grid of holes where the owner can bolt on handholds or footholds. Because it is a chore to rearrange those, climbers tend to cover their walls in holds and then choose which to utilize while they're scaling the wall. But it can be difficult to remember which holds to grab when following a specific route. PeggyBoard solves that problem by illuminating an LED near each chosen hold. Those are "NeoPixel" individually addressable RGB LEDs, so they can light up in different colors to indicate the purpose of a specific hold. Starting holds are green, handholds are pink, footholds are blue, and finishing holds are red.

The best part is the accompanying app, which lets users map out new routes through a graphical interface and save them for later. So a climber can switch between routes at any time and friends can share routes to challenge each other.

A Raspberry Pi (3 Model B or higher) single-board computer controls everything. Power for it and the LEDs comes from a beefy power supply. The LEDs are WS2812B models with long wires between them and they fit into any unoccupied hold mounting holes. A touchscreen connected to the Raspberry Pi lets users configure settings and easily find the IP address.

After setup, any user on the same network as the Raspberry Pi can use that IP address to access the web app. From there, they can select an existing route or create a new route. When creating a new route, the user can map out the holds and assign a grade. When selecting an existing route, the user is presented with a list of route names, their authors, their creation dates, and their grades.

If you have a home rock climbing wall or own a gym, then PeggyBoard would be a very exciting upgrade.