For 99% of our packages, the weight of the box is under 10lb. So far we've found the Salter Brecknell 7010SB is a small, fairly well made scale. You can pick up the whole package for about $60-$70. This is actually a fair price, the accuracy ranges from 0.1 oz (for under 5lb packages) to 0.5 oz (for 5-10 lb packages). This is totally acceptable for shipping where under a few lbs, the postage is done by the oz and over 5 lb postage tends to be done by the lb.
The scale comes with a wall plug and a serial cable. The plug has a 3.5mm 'audio' plug and the serial cable has only two conductors - ground and TX - connected to a 2.5mm audio plug. To use, simply power it up and plug the serial port to your computer. We buy computers with COM ports built into them so that the COM port is fixed in hardware , but you can also use any USB to serial converter cable that will give you a USB plug.
If you are trying to connect to a microcontroller/microcomputer, you can use a male DB-9 and then use a MAX232 or similar to convert from the +-10V inverted serial that comes out of the cable and convert it to plain 3.3-5V TTL serial
The bottom has two removable plates. One reveals a 9V battery (you can turn this into a portable scale but we think the 9V plug works best) and the other reveals some THM PCB. Not really sure what that's for but perhaps during test they use it?
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