An open source alternative for LED climbing board control
Try it out at boardsesh.com | Join us on Discord
LED climbing boards like Moonboard, Kilter, Tension, Decoy, and Grasshopper have become incredibly popular in the climbing community. These boards represent a significant investment—a 7x10 Kilter homewall with mainline holds runs around $10,000, plus another $2,000 or so for the LED lighting system.
Here's the thing: those climbing holds will work forever. No apps, no licensing, no connectivity required. But to use the LED system that makes these boards truly interactive, we're all dependent on Moon Climbing or Aurora Climbing. Each company servicing a large part of the market without cross-compatibility.
Single Vendor Risk
Thousands of dollars worth of climbing equipment relies on software from two small companies. If that software stops working, your expensive LED system becomes unusable.
You're also at the mercy of the whims of the owners of these companies. Not too long ago Moon Board tried to block creation of new problems on one of their older boards: see this Reddit discussion. This was rolled back, but there are no guarantees this won't happen again. Either of these companies could also change owners. What if a future owner wants to introduce a subscription model?
Instead of spending their time building great app experiences, both companies have implemented app attest which blocks external access to the climb data. However, the climb data isn't theirs—it's the users'.
Frustrated with the lack of development and anxious about being locked into a single vendor, we built Boardsesh—an open source alternative that anyone can use, modify, and host themselves.
With Boardsesh, you get:
- Queue management — Coordinate climbs when training with others
- Real-time collaboration — Share sessions with friends via Party Mode
- Active development — New features and bug fixes from the community
- No lock-in — Self-host if you want complete control
- Transparency — See exactly how your data is used
Boardsesh is completely open source under the Apache license. You can view the code, contribute features, report bugs, or fork it entirely to run your own instance.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup instructions.
We would welcome collaboration with the official app vendors and would love to integrate through more official means. Unfortunately, so far Aurora has been hostile to any collaboration attempts.
Your expensive climbing board shouldn't stop working because a single app goes down. Together, we can build something better—software that belongs to the climbing community.