ST Compatible Load Cell For Gas Bottle?

Hi! Hoping for some inspiration. In Spain my hot water is fuelled by a 12kg Butane bottle. I live in fear of the day when the bottle dies mid winter half way through a shower. I am thinking of a simple way of hooking one up to a load cell to trigger an alert when the cell registers a certain weight. Does anyone have any ideas please?

TIA

Jon

I have not seen a zwave or zigbee device that is designed to measure weight but I would not be surprised if one existed, especially if zigbee. However there may be another way for you to do this if you have sufficient technical background.

One way of doing this would be to find an appropriate load cell with a physical design suitable to weigh the gas bottle, and also having a weight range that is not too far above the maximum weight of the bottle to get the best accuracy. You then need signal conditioning to translate the low voltage from the sensor to something easier to digitize, such as 0-5V or 0-10V.

To acquire this voltage you can possibly use a Qubino or Fibaro device (I believe a few of them have 0-10V inputs) or an Arduino.

This thread talks about options to acquire a 0-10V signal:

If you go the Arduino route, you will need this:

I saw a number of supported measurements that use analog inputs but none specically for weight. Maybe @ogiewon can provide suggestions on how to accomplish this. I have ideas but I’ll let him give you better direction if Arduino is the direction you want to take.

I can’t search the Fibaro/Qubino devices with 0-10V inpus right now, but I am hoping others on the forum can fill this gap.

Edit… this is an example of the signal conditioning you would need:

(randomly picked / just an example)

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Many thanks @aruffell. Ill keep that in mind as I do have knowledgeable friends who would probably be able to do that.