[joe] wanted to make it easy to record his weight every day, and added a few bits to decode the weight and send it to his computer. The end result is a ZigBee-powered wireless scale. Additionally, his scale can track more than one person’s data simply by knowing whose previous weight the new measurement is closest to. Now [joe] and his family can spend more time working out, and less time messing with spreadsheets and data entry.
[joe]’s build is not only elegant, but well-documented, too. He walks through the reasons he chose this specific floor scale, reverse engineering it to decode the weight, then provides links to his schematics, source code, and pretty much everything else you would need to play along at home.
looks a little sloppy but if it works, that’s cool. i would have just put the wireless on the pcb (no zigbee module) and used a ribbon cable for the LCD connection but that’s just me.
Would’t it be a balance and not a scale?
I’m looking to get into Arduinos but I have a question: If I wanted to build two units that communicate at low range between one another (2 Meters) is Zigbee a good choice?
Awesome! I have been thinking something like this would be extremenly useful in my “geek” house but had no idea how to accomplish it.
I wonder if there is a proper analog signal on the board to tap on to, to read out the pressure sensor directly.
That would save most of the wires.
If the 10 bit resolution of the XBee module’s ADC is sufficient, there’s not even need for a controller.