I need a large scale

B

Thread Starter

Brendan

I have a plastic pallet/skid thats 5'x5' and what I would like to do is be able to determine the weight of of whatever I put on the skid. For instance, if I load 10 boxes onto the skid then I want somthing that is able to determine the exact weight of what is on the skid without using a traditional scale. So if i have 5 skids set up like this i can determine their weight without moving them to a scale. Are their any weight sensitive pads out there? I'm envisioning something like a 5'x 5' mouse pad haha. Any ideas would be much appreciated. thanks

[email protected]
 
C

Curt Wuollet

How bout a compression load cell under each corner and a summing box going to an instrumentation amp and scaling readout. You've just built a scale, but at least you save some bucks over a packaged solution. Or what amounts to a 5x5 air mattress, measure the pressure and do the math. There are a lot of ways to do this, most are more difficult and costly than the first. The trick is how you buy the load cells. I have seen someone hack 4 electronic bathroom scales to sum for pallets, and it did work.

Instrumentation quality calibrated load cells are spendy, but if you can do the cal yourself there are much cheaper cells around.

Or you can do it the way we did in the old days, glue strain gauges on four simple beam bender supports for the corners and calibrate. The electronics to use arbitrary scale factors are much cheaper than calibrated load cells.

Regards
cww
 
Hi
Load cells to measure the mass...and a signal conditioner. Google load cell conditioners. If you want to make the conditioner then that's another story...
Keep in mind that you must be able to tare it and calibrate to read the correct weight, have no drift ...etc, etc
My suggestion is to buy the load cell and matching conditioner.
 
Top