On Tuesday I finished the assembly of the load cell based automatic force measuring system:

After testing, the prototype can automaticlly measure small scale force up to 100g with precision up to 0.01g (I am still working on improving the resolution of the system). Here are two images for measuring the same battery on digital scale and the load cell system:

To use this system, first download the arduino codes here (Courtesy of Sparkfun.com) as well as HX711 library here

There are two sketchs in the folder: calibrate and measure. The load cell needs to be calibrated first - simply run the sketch, put a known weight on top of the plate, enter "-" or "+" into the terminal based on the reading, and obtain the final constant. Then run the measure sketch, put in the calibration constant and it should be ready to go. If there's no reading on the serial terminal, check if the data and clk pins match the actual connection.

The prototype still has several issues - load cell is too close to the amplifier, and jumper wires are messy and error-prone. I will keep working on updating the system in the following weeks to increase its accuracy. Also, I'm currently working on using PLX-DAQ to send data from Arduino to excel and plot in real time, which should be integrated soon.

Github links:

https://github.com/sparkfun/HX711-Load-Cell-Amplifier

https://github.com/bogde/HX711

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