Or buy a cheap set of electronic bathroom scales and hack it.
Brian

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The Sofa of Brian Gaff...

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"T i m" wrote in message
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Peeps,

I would like to read the output of a strain gauge (measuring weight
(0-5kg) in this instance) from a PC as part of a general experiment
but not sure what bit does (and maybe limits), what.

So, strain gauge (or gauges) connects to a SG amp and that turns the
output into volts?

Then you could read said volts with say an Arduino and then have a USB
interface to PC, effectively streaming the output of the strain gauge
in ASCII (numbers) to the PC (and the rest is software etc) .

However, I understand the Arduino's only have a 10(12 with a tweak)
bit ADC and so with 10 bits I'm only going to get 1024 output values?

eg, If that was a 1kg 'scale' then I could read around 1g increments
but if it was a 5kg scale then ~5g would be the smallest increment
(that may be fine but I am just testing my understanding here).

Or is the output of the little eBay strain gauge amps already serial
so if it was a 24 bit device (16777216) it would be resolving down to
~1/3000 of a g (mathematically at least) and so would just use the
Arduino to turn it into ASCII over a USB interface (no ADC needed)?

I know you can buy commercial strain gauge to ASCII over USB devices
but they aren't exactly cheap (~£250+).

Cheers, T i m