Turning a climbing wall into an interactive game

Artificial climbing walls are important for training, as few people can get to real rock walls regularly enough to keep up with practice. But like anything else, that can become boring if you’re just doing the same thing over and over again. To keep things fresh and fun, Superbender turned his indoor climbing wall into an interactive game.

This is a climbing wall built in a regular indoor room, with eight-foot walls. So, it isn’t very tall. But it wraps around two of the room’s walls, so it is wide. There are also various holds on the ceiling, giving a fair amount of traversal options. But if the climber is simply vibing, they’ll have a tendency to follow the same routes and won’t push themselves.

Superbender’s interactive elements turn everything into a game played through LEDs and buttons on the wall. The LEDs indicate paths or areas the climber can or can’t use, while the buttons act as goals to reach. The “Hot Lava” game mode, for example, has areas of red LED lava that grow between traversals and must be avoided, so the climber has to get increasingly creative with each turn.

A great deal of Superbender’s well-detailed Instructables tutorial focuses on the construction of the wall, but the electronic elements are what interest us. Those are based on Arduino Due and Arduino Nano boards. The Due has a TFT display and buttons for setting up games. It also controls the WS2812b individually addressable RGB LEDs embedded in the wall and monitors the buttons. A distributed power circuit feeds all of the LEDs safely. The Nano controls an amplifier to play sounds at the request of the Due.

As you would expect, wiring was a serious undertaking. The LEDs cover a huge area and that isn’t trivial to wire up, but the power distribution helped to avoid voltage drops over long runs. 

Now Superbender and his climbing buddies can train as much as they want, without getting bored on the relatively small wall.