This week we worked on the load cell portion of our project. We spent most of our time trying to troubleshoot. However, after spending time troubleshooting both together and on our own we still couldn’t figure out if our load cell wasn’t working because of a hardware or a software issue. We’ve tried different libraries, switching the orientation of the load cell, adding washers, etc. but there hasn’t been much progress on figuring out what’s going wrong. As far as we could tell there was no issue with the soldering since we could produce an output, just not consistently. Unrelated to the load cell, we got the velcro to hold the servo to the wall, which helped with the effectiveness of the switch, as seen below.

Side view of mounted switch mechanism
Load Cell with tape measure as a counter weight – one thing we ran into was the fact that we needed a counterweight to the plate we’d be putting our phones on. Some of the solutions we saw that were cleaner than our temporary setup involved 3d printing a base. However, it’s likely we’re going to use tape since we haven’t thought of any other feasible, permanent solution.

Two important things we want to accomplish next week –
– Fix the load cell functionality; we have not managed to consistently get the load cell to work.
– Relay the load cell output to the arduino