Introduction

This a simple attempt to make your home climbing wall controllable using WS2811 addressable LEDs using the PySide GUI library and a Flask server running on a microcontroller.

This is my first ever software project so yes its messy, yes its probably wrong, no I didn't follow an MVC architecture, yes my code is all over the place and its very buggy, but it does work... kind of.

I'm really keen to see if others are up for contributing and helping make this an app people can really get some use out of!

Installation

There is no build step for the application.

Simply clone this repo and install the requirements.txt and the application should run.

Home Set-Up

There isn't a no-code way of getting this application to work on your homeboard.

At the moment the minimal number of steps required to get this working on your home wall will be the following:

Software Set-Up

1. Create a new BoardUI.ui file using QDesigner.
2. Add QLabel to a widget and add a QPixMap to the QLabel containing a 400x400 image of your board (feel free to rezie/change the layout of the application to your needs)
3. Overlay QPushbuttons ontop of the QLabel that will act as the buttons for your climbing wall - I set mine to transparent
4. Navigate to your UI file and do pyside6-uic BoardUI.ui - BoardUi.ui.py
5. Now import the Widget inside of the BoardWidget class
6. You will now need to update the create_button_group function within the board widget class as it is using a magic number to build the button group for the hold buttons. The loop range should include all the QPushButtons you just created in QDesigner
7. Run the server.py file on your microcontroller - I used an RPI 3b+ running raspian. You will need to run the requirements.txt on your PI as well.
8. Change the url in tools/sendClimbRequest to match your localhost.
9. edit hold2ledconvert.py to map your led string reference with the hold number within the pyside application - this is how the server knows which light to change when you press buttons inside the app.

Hardware Set-Up

1. Get a string of WS2811 addressable led strings and a 5v barrel plug adapter and plug
2. Connect a ground to your board, and the green wire into a GPIO pin.

Once this is completed you should have LEDs powered by a 5v cable, that is plugged into a microcontroller/pi running a flask server. You can then start the PySide application up and assuming the above is correct, you should be able to click "create route" and click on holds it will illuminate leds.

How it Works

I'm going to try and briefly explain the basic running of the appliction.

main.py is the entry point for the application. This is a child of a QMainWindow which is the framework for building the application interface. It also intitalized the Database, builds the tables etc.

The MainWidget is main widget which controls and orchestrates all the other widgets (the climbing board, forms, table etc). Unfortunately, I did not know what a class was when I wrote this app, let alone MVC architecture so please don't expect any facny architecture or design patters in this codebase. The MainWidget is a child of a QWidget and accepts, the parameters for the MainWidget are the database connections initalized in main.py.

Within the MainWidget,I have initalized all the child widgets of the application (board, forms etc) and control the database connections going to each widget. The MainWidget contains the logic for the following operations:

• Creating a climb
• Get saved route from databse
• Dispalying route (in app, and also sending http request to the server)
• Other ui controls (default views etc)

Another key component is the BoardWidget. The boardwidget is created from a UI file from within QDesigner. This displays the image of the climbing board, and controls the buttons for the climbing holds.

All the other form based widgets are more than self explanatory.

User Accounts: There is user accounts in it at the moment but it is very much as WIP. You can make a login, and login, but I have no proper functionality for tracking who is logged in and what it means for assigning who set the route etc.

Database: I have three tables in my database: users, climb history, and climbs. My plan for the database is to keep track of everytime a user clicks a climb so you can use it as some kind of training log to keep track of projects and ticked off climbs etc.