What does your Woody look like??? 2.0

I have a mirrored spray. I had a standard spray as well. They're all cool, lots of pros and cons. I decided to give it a try for a while because any time I set one problem.... I get another for free. It does have some limits tho and if I were to do it again I might not do symmetrical.

Darren Mabe wrote:

My little 30ft Woody I have been working on

Wow. Just wow. I'm so jealous. 

Pretty much done except for filing in with holds, adding some ply over the dead horizontal section, and getting some more padding.
I'll need to redo the upper bit of ply in the left of the photo, too.  Obviously, I f*cked up a measurement. That corner gave me hell with only a circular saw to work with.

Overall, happy with how it turned out given the limitations on space.  
It's about 49degrees overhanging on the right side, and about 10' from kicker to top lip.  It's narrow, one sheet of ply, so basically just trying hard moves in isolation for me, and traversing to the other section.  My six year old can make some legit problems for himself.   I did put a few holds up the outside on the right to give some arete moves and heelhooks
The left side is about 20 degrees overhanging, so only about 7' tall total, and about one sheet wide also.  
Right now I've got primarily Rocky Mtn Holds that I stumbled upon for cheap, some home-made wood holds, and a few Metolius screw ons.  Have a few Driftless feet and edges on the way.  Definitely need some more true jugs and some good textured pinches.
If I were to do one thing differently, I would have put the crack machine on the right side and allowed the face climbing to go unbroken.  Not a huge deal.  The crack will probably just always be "on" for traversing.  

Hey all,

I'm posting because I built a new little app for logging problems on my home wall, and I am wondering if anyone else would like to try it out.

Like many others, I recently built a quarantine wall. While I'm a big fan of the existing commercial board layouts (Moon, Tension, Kilter), I didn't have room in my space for a full 8'x12' board. So I built my wall with a mix of holds, and started to look for a way to track the problems that I was setting.

I did a bunch of searching and tried out the existing apps -- Stokt, OpenClimb, Spray, etc -- but none of them fit my needs. The biggest limitation of these apps is that they work by having you take a photo of your entire board, and then overlaying a highlight for the holds you select as part of a problem. This means that if you decide to change any of the holds on your board, you'll need to take an entirely new photo, and potentially lose all of the problems that you've created!

So I decided to create an app that would work a bit differently. Instead of taking a photo of your entire board, you upload photos of your individual holds. Then, you "set" your holds on the board dynamically, so that you can change them later without having to reset the entire board. This lets you do some pretty cool things... like seeing "which problems do I use this hold in?" and "which holds on my systems board are the least-frequently used?"

As of right now, I've just been working on the app in my spare time. (Which I have an abundance of, due to quarantine...)

But I'm curious to see: would other folks with systems boards find this app useful? Does anyone want to beta test and provide some feedback?

p.s. here's a photo of the woody, but it's built in a bedroom and literally impossible to take a full photo of! ~10ft wide, 96" ceilings, 40deg board, mix of Moon/Atomik/Metolius/Homemade wood holds.

That sounds like a good idea. I just set up my wall and was about to try out the spray app, but decided not to since I figured that having  just thrown up a bunch of holds that it was likely that I’d swap some around and have to start over.

Your approach seems like it removes that problem. The initial setup of cataloging each hold must be a little time consuming? I’d give it a try.

I’d love to beta test your app. 

csproul: thank you! Send me a DM and we can coordinate?

And yes, you're right: the initial setup is by far the biggest downside of my approach. There are a couple ways to do it currently:

1. Before setting the board, lay out all of the holds on a flat surface with an easily cropped-out background. (Think green screen...)
2. If the board is already set, you can just take a single photo of the board like you would for any of the other apps, and use image manipulation software (like Photoshop) to separate the holds from the background.

But yes, this would be the challenge for adoption with this app. My plan for beta testing is that I will just do some of this manual labor myself, but if the app were to gain more adoption, I'll need to figure out a way to make it more efficient.

I am in no way involved with the Stokt app, but I suspect that this upfront labor is the reason that they charge a startup fee and not a subscription fee. (And the reason the fee increases with the size of your board!)

My neighbors think it's a trebuchet and i can hardly blame them. Fully adjustable angle by moving the base away from the tree and letting it rest lower on the high end. 

Eric K wrote:

I have installed a 2x6 that runs horizantlly along the studs half way up the backside of my wall. I used this to stand on and replace the one spinner of a T-nut I had. Worked well enough.

This!!! I did something similar but with a sheet of plywood, creating a shelf for storage where I keep spare holds, drills, etc.

Auden Alsop wrote:

If you take off or add holds you just take a new saved picture. I haven’t run into any difficulties with losing problems and I’m adding new holds nearly every session 

With the spray app, if you upload a new picture, do you keep all your old problems or is it now a “new” wall? Do you just delete all the problems that used the holds that were removed/moved? I honestly haven’t tried it yet so it might be obvious once I do.

With Eat, Spray Love it does not erase your problems when you upload a new photo.

Your app seems cool, but doesn't solve the problem unless you can take the holds and move them around even after setting? How well do the hold pictures have to be edited? I have an 8x10 fully set with a kicker and screw on's for 345 holds total.

Karl Walters wrote: Your app seems cool, but doesn't solve the problem unless you can take the holds and move them around even after setting? How well do the hold pictures have to be edited? I have an 8x10 fully set with a kicker and screw on's for 345 holds total.

Yup, what you're describing here is the reason I built the app. Your holds are stored as independent images, so you can move them around, rotate them, etc much as you want. Here's a short screencast that explains it: api.monosnap.com/file/downl…

As for the image editing, this is definitely the crux of it. I'm personally getting faster and faster using Pixelmator to crop images, but eventually I'm going to try and figure out a way to either make the process automated or build some sort of tool to cut down on the amount of time it takes. (For the first few beta users, I'm just doing this manual labor myself.)

Also, thanks guys for clarifying re: the Spray app. I'll download it again but I think I understand how it works now -- it  stores the images that you upload, and if you view an old problem, it just shows you the old image. Makes sense!

I think that my approach of uploading each individual hold separately has a few benefits over the "just take a photo of the entire board" approach:

- Select a hold and see "which problems is it used in?"
- Ask the app: "which holds are most frequently used?", or "which holds aren't being used in any problems so that I can reset them?"
- If you're not using some of the holds in their current configuration, you can change them without taking a new photo
- Taking a photo of the entire board is not always easy. The only way to take a full photo of my board is to stitch together multiple photos taken from different spots.
- In my limited experience, the "take a photo of the board" apps seem to render kinda slowly? I'm not certain why... but my approach of rendering the holds separately is similar to how the Moonboard app does it, and seems like it might lead to a more responsive UI.

That said, if you're happy with one of the current apps out there, by all means keep using it!

Pretty pleased with this—and lucky to come across a full set of used tension board holds.

That’s a nice come up!

As for the app I’d use it but worry about setup overhead

Karl Walters wrote: That’s a nice come up!

As for the app I’d use it but worry about setup overhead

Yeah, super jealous of those Tension holds. Those things are expensive!

And yes, setup overhead is a lot. Maybe eventually I'll get it working with computer vision, and you can point your camera at your board and the hold images will automatically be segmented. If Google can do it with people....

DM'd you about testing this out!

Took some proof of concept footage for you guys this morning. Belayed by CAMP Goblin.

Ben K wroteMy neighbors think it's a trebuchet and i can hardly blame them.

must admit that was my first idea as well.  :PNice setup!

Well everyone she’s done. It took forever. So many people here to thank. But I’ll just say you know who you are. Thank you. My only fear was the ledger. But it’s so solid it would hold a Harley. I’ve jumped on the wall. I’ve hung on it and yanked on the top to try and get the ledger to budge. But it is ROCK SOLID. The winch is so money. If I re-did it I would make it easier to set up the chains. But it works just fine. Super stoked to paint this bad boy, start setting holds, and putting some moves together.