Hacked Stamps.com Scale Displays Weight

Hacked Stamps.com Scale Displays Weight

 

Stamps.com seems to be promoting their service in all corners of the web these days. Their scales are a big part of how their service works to allow you to print your own stamps at home. Only thing is the fully functional scale they provide is only good if it is connected to a computer since there is no display on it (looks like the new scales do have displays on them). Oleg had one of these scales and wanted to use it while it wasn’t plugged into the computer. Using an Arduino and a HD44780 LCD he can now see the weight that the scale is reading.

Via: Hack a Day

“For this project I used the following:

  1. An Arduino board. Standard size board, such as UNO, Duemilanove or Leonardo, will work
  2. USB Host Shield
  3. Toshiba HD44780-compatible LCD display, in 16×1 or 16×2 configuration. If you’re planning to use this sketch for something else, like data logging, the display is optional – all output from the scale is repeated to the serial port
  4. Stamps.com 5lb digital scale. Scales are standard HID devices with usage table 0x8d, therefore, scales from other brands may work as well with no or minimal modifications to the code
  5. USB Host library