Happy New Year!  It’s our goal to provide great service to you again this year and to bring you some really nice products that make your job easier. Cardinal Scale Manufacturing in Webb City Missouri has a digital weight indicator product line that is very popular with our customers. Cardinal’s weight indicators provide easy, convenient scale operation and accurate, reliable measurements. From basic truck scale weighing to complex process automation, Cardinal Scale probably makes a weight indicator for your application. Whether operators need an easy-to-maintain wash-down indicator or an indicator that provides highly visible scale readouts, a Cardinal indicator from Central Carolina Scale usually has an option available to suit a wide range of weighing needs.

The latest announcement from Cardinal Scale is very exciting for those of us in the weighing industry. Over the years customers have always asked us “can I send weight data to my pc” or “we need to send scale data to the computer”. And the answer that we usually told customers was well, yes you can…… but it might require some additional software or yes… but it might require some other type of hurdle or challenge. Over the years it has gotten easier but depending on the product and what you are trying to connect to, it could be a real challenge to send weight data reliably and consistently to a computer. But, now with the new Cardinal 2XX-USBA option board which is listed as USB-A Card, 2 USB-A Ports, One Micro SD Port – you have the ability to add a USB flash drive to a select group of Cardinal indicators like the 205, 210 and 225 and easily collect weighing data. For example, with one 4GB flash drive, you could literally collect millions of weight transactions. Then once you’re ready to view the transactions, you remove the flash drive and take a look at the CSV file on your computer. It’s easy to add titles to the columns and sum the weight column to determine the total amount of weight that you’ve weighed over a period of time.

Now of course we do offer other systems that do provide data collection software in real time but in most of those cases it requires some type of scale software and the ability to connect the scale to your company network typically through Ethernet.  Those are certainly good systems and we do recommend those in many situations. But, if you’re just looking for the ability to collect weight data that can easily be collected on a USB thumb drive and then inserted into your PC, then you need to take a look at the Cardinal Scale product line. Once you insert the USB flash drive into your computer, you can analyze and manipulate the data as you see fit using Excel software which most everyone seems to have these days. You can choose to keep the existing weight data on the flash drive and put it back into the scale indicator and continue accumulating data or you can erase the data since you already have it on your PC now, — the choice is yours.  One other nice feature of the Cardinal Scale indicator with optional 2XX-USB-A card is that you can plug in a USB keyboard which makes entering ID’s and data a little easier than using the traditional method of typing using the scale keypad.

We at Central Carolina Scale have been very impressed with the Cardinal Scale indicators, particularly over the past couple of years. The 190 with multiple color display has been very popular. Now, certain indicators can easily collect weight data by adding an optional board and USB thumb drive.  We suggest that you take a look at a Cardinal Scale readout next time you are in the market for a scale system. These digital indicators can be connected and calibrated to just about any scale system out there.  If you need some information or would like to receive a quote for one of these products, please contact us via our sales page or by phone at 919-776-7737.

Since we were talking about simple scale data collection, we wanted to just mention briefly some of Cardinal’s other products in this arena. Cardinal Scale offers a number of connectivity options for sending scale weight measurement data to peripheral equipment such as indicators, remote displays, PCs, networks, printers, and even mobile devices such as digital tablets and smart phones. For short range, non-legal-for-trade Wi-Fi connectivity, ScaleNET offers the solution for transmitting weight data to PCs, Android®, and Apple® devices over a wireless network. For long-range connectivity (up to 1 mile line of sight), NTEP applications, SnapStream is the answer. SnapStream is a fully-integrated wireless scale system that offers a number of advantages and cost-saving benefits for truck, floor, and tank/hopper scales. Also, the Cardinal iCan intelligent junction box provides NTEP analog-to-digital conversion for scales with real-time monitoring via Cardinal’s iSite software.