Dynamic weight measurement.

[Darkspeed]

Ok I have been kicking this idea around.. It seems important to know what your bus weight is and running to the scales seems like a chore, especially for some geographic locations.

I am working on a system that integrates a suspension bump stop with a 4/20ma digital load cell so at any time you could deflate your air bags and sit on your bump stops and get a real time 4 corner bus weight on a digital display.

Has anyone done this before? It would be a simple and inexpensive Arduino project to pull off.

[eagle19952]

Has anyone done this before? It would be a simple and inexpensive Arduino project to pull off.

no.

[Scott & Heather]

If you could make this work and be accurate, I have some trucker friends who drive gravel who would
Love yhis


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[daddyoften]

Sounds awesome. One thing that comes to mind is that won't give you the weight of anything under the load cells, i.e. The axles , brakes, tires and wheels.
I have seen similar setups on some transport trucks and trailers but I don't know the working of it but some can see their weights real time with some sort of sensors. Theirs might be in the air bag air system measuring the air pressure but I'm not sure
Eric

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[luvrbus]

LoadRite has been around for years I had them on my trucks and loader buckets

[eagle19952]

maybe a transducer in your leveling jacks... not sure why you would want to know your weight "at all times"...

[Scott & Heather]

How accurate are they cliff? I just rode shotgun with my trucker friend as he transported loads of gravel to a concrete plant. The guys at the pit driving the loaders have scales in them but he seems to always get overloaded and has to try to dump 2,000 lbs which is pretty hard to do so he ends up dumping too much and losing the $$ for that run. If he could see his weight in real time, he could tell the loader to slowly dump the final bucket until he's reached max load....


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[Darkspeed]

I have seen them on loaders but not trucks / buses.

I sure would like to know what i weighed when adding water / fuel / packing for a trip / etc...

The load cells im talking about using would be in the 20lb+- range.

And yes it would only weigh the sprung load.

I could just see it causing conflict... " honey did you know you were 2lb lighter before we stopped for lunch?..... Smack!"

[digesterman]

We load semi trailers using air bags to give us pretty accurate weights, I think could easily be done. You would have to know your trailer, axle weights first tho

[luvrbus]

Scott, they are only as accurate as the operator we calibrated ours every morning but lot of different brands out there some poor, fair,good and better I considered mine a good investment over the years saved me a lot of tickets   

[thomasinnv]

They been using them on logging trucks for years

[Scott & Heather]

Ok. Interesting. Our bus weight doesn't change much since we fulltime and we aren't heavy, but I definitely could see this being useful for some


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[luvrbus]

We don't weigh ours when she gets all the sewing stuff and the rest of her gadgets we are full anyway 

[jackhanow]

if your close to the dump/transfer station, or a ready mix, or the truck stop, you can get it weighed most times for free or just a few bucks. ive seen people pull tons of rock out of their busses. never once worried about it. but if you know the weight of your bus at a certain loaded capacity, you can just say ok im 500 lbs heavier now, and be pretty close. besides, your not trying to get it airborne for the transatlantic flight to dover.

[Jim Eh.]

Todd, any time a passenger (significant other to be precise) and weight are mentioned in the same sentence you are playing with fire. LOL
Although for a cheaper alternative than a $700 to $2500 corner weighting system I would be all ears for a weight range of 800 to 4000 lbs cars.