Cardinal Armor series Smartcell digital truck scales have several distinct benefits to you, the customer. First there is the heavy duty weighbridge design the Cardinal Armor digital truck scale uses. For example, the steel deck has (12) 12 inch eye beams across the scale but most important is there’s no moving parts under the scale.
ADVANTAGES OF A DIGITAL TRUCK SCALE
With a traditional truck scale, when it comes to debris build-up under the scale, that you typically see in landfills, quarries, sand and gravel businesses; all of that debris can cause problems under the scale and cause binding. Then you will be forced to have folks out there power washing the truck scale, trying to get the scale to work properly because safe linkage systems or load cells that are mounted to piers; the debris impedes on that critical weighing process.
This can often lead to down time for cleaning and can also lead to your scale being rejected when being tested by the State weights and measures inspector.
Another key element of the Cardinal Armor digital truck scale is simple connections which can also lead to limited downtime. Most important there is no power running to the scale other than the home run cable, that’s very important. Do you know what lightning, rain, and snow can do over time to the junction boxes of a traditional truck scale? There’s over a hundred and eight connection points in many standard analog truck scales.
But, with the armor digital system, there’s ten. There’s five wires that plug into the terminal connector to go to the first load cell and there’s five that you simply wire into the weight indicator in fact Cardinal chooses 225 and the 825 as indicators of choice but most important for you; you want limited downtime for the life of the truck scale.
The Armor digital truck scale features iSite technology. Your truck scale is your cash register, you need to be up and running at all times. This scale can help make that much more attainable with real time diagnostics.
The new exclusive remote diagnostic software called Isite can notify Central Carolina Scale and/or you if that truck scale fails, sometimes before you see it on the weight indicator. You could take for instance on an Apple device on an Android device and you can be alerted when there’s a failure with one load cell or a cable immediately. One benefit for Central Carolina Scale is we will see what the system detects as the actual problem.
This will hopefully lead to less troubleshooting time and quicker truck scale repairs which saves you money. Once we see the alert, we’ll know what to do for your scale. We can simply bring a replacement load cell or a spare cable and off we go to fix the issue efficiently.
Armor truck scale systems are also very easy to install. Older analog truck scales traditionally have cables that run through conduit throughout the scale and all the way to the junction box in the scale. You’ve got over a hundred or so connections to the junction box with a traditional truck scale.
DIGITAL LOAD CELLS
The SmartCell digital double-ended shear beam stainless steel load cell by Cardinal is fully protected IP69, meaning this load cell can be waterproof for any of those environments that you come up with especially in landfills, quarries, when the heavy rain storms come, but behind a small area of the load cell cavity is your surge protection.
Generally, you don’t have to worry about isolated surge protection just in a junction box, the design protects it at the load cell level with this digital truck scale. Secondly is the analog to digital conversion that goes on in this cell. All load cells are analog, with SmartCells we are taking the analog cell and converting it to digital right here in the cell. It’s not dependent on any other electronic devices.
The digital truck scale system load cells run in series. So let’s start at load cell number one. Your home run cable simply connects to this point with a watertight connector with metal braided cables, then we go from this number one load cell through the rest of the scale across the scale and down simply going from load cell to load cell to load cell running in series so when you note (8) load cell system we could say we have eight load cells in a bus.
There singularly connected all the way to the end the scale, and at the very last load cell in the system, you’ll just have a terminator cap that goes on the last connector of the load cell.
Most important is the way this load cell mounts in the scale. We have a stand just a solid steel stand that load cell sits on. Most important is there’s no linkage assembly, it’s simply two stainless steel bolts to mount this load cell to the top of the Weigh bridge. Near the top of the weighbridge on that stand is a hardened receiver cup that the two-inch chromium alloy ball sits in.
The radius of the load cells are designed to sit on that ball. This is an axis centering completely access centering system and what’s that do? Remember there’s no moving parts under the scale for debris. There’s no buffer plates for impediments that you have put in that foundation, and there there’s no check rod assemblies.
Let’s take a closer look at what really is the Cardinal Armor SmartCell digital truck scale system. Number one, we use the 225 digital weight indicator which is ideal with a graphics display for scale diagnostics. So what happens if you have some kind of failure? Here’s an example.
Let’s see what happens when we have a cable break or a load cell failure. So, we have the 75K load cells in our scales and we’re running the home run cable from the 225 to cell number one and so on. So, let’s say that now something’s going to happen to the scale in normal service operations, two, three, four years down the road, something’s occurred and it’s not weighing properly. How do we figure all that out? The Cardinal 225 makes it simple. We now have the solution to Diagnostics in the field or via the cloud to take care of you, the customer.
Let’s say that we have some sort of failure on a connector and or cable and or load cell from load cell number three. When I remove this load cell cable to simulate that process the display of the two to five, the indicator says there is a break between load cells one and three. With a traditional analog truck scale, the weight display might say some type of error message like Cal Failure, but they don’t tell you what happened and then a scale tech will have to troubleshoot, sometimes extensively.
With this Cardinal Armor SmartCell system, the 225 display will tell you and your service technician what happens within the two to five or eight to five cells. We have cloud-based Diagnostics with Cardinal iSite, my cell phone will also be alerted that I have a failure on this scale. That’s truly important, so if you were driving down the road or maybe you’re at home having dinner and a load cell failed, either your scale company and/or you, the customer, are going to know about it.
Now let’s look at what happens when we reconnect and repair the scale. When we’ve had that designated failure where it says that we have a break between load cells 1 & 3 so if the scale is not connected to the iSite and you simply have an indicator and a SmartCell system, typically you would call Central Carolina Scale and say you have a problem and the 225 weight display says break between load cells 1 & 3. The indicator has self-diagnostics that will help you, the customer, and the scale technician.
If I’m the technician, I can have the scale operator push down on the shift key and wait for a message to come up that says cell Diagnostics and now that scale operator can tell the scale technician over the phone what they see among those load cells in that axle system, it says that number one is seeing weight but now number two has no response, number three has no response, number four has no response. Those other three load cells are not seen past load cell number one.
So, we either have a problem with the load cell or we have a cable break. So, we know when we go out to the customers job site we need to look somewhere within load cell number two or the cable coming from the load cell. This can lead to much simpler scale troubleshooting which means less downtime for your “cash register”.
With this digital truck scale, there’s no voltmeters, no junction box to get filled full of water. By adding a Cardinal Armor Digital Truck Scale with SmartCells to your facility, when a technician arrives to check or repair the truck scale, he/she already knows how the scale is operating.
The Cardinal Armor SmartCell system is absolutely the easiest scale in the world to calibrate with smart Cal. But let’s talk about additional protection for you, the customer. Calibration, we’re always concerned about, are we going to lose calibration? What’s going to happen when I have to put a new board in the 225 indicator?
What Cardinal has done is create a non volatile environment, so the 225 weight indicator just has a standard PC board. All the factory added is a digital load cell card. That digital load cell card is placed where the dual scale card normally would be and on that digital load cell card is a simple ethernet connector. That Ethernet connector is included. So if I have a failure of the DLC card this special option card it will come up and tell me that I have a failure with the DLC card so now the scale technician can go out to your site, open up the back of the 225, put in a new DLC card.
But, then what’s going to happen? It’s going to come back to weigh because when we calibrate that scale the Cardinal system writes the calibration to the PC board of the 225 and also to the DLC card.
So whether we replace the PC board of the 225 or the DLC card, we simply answer a simple question did you replace the DLC or did you replace the PC board of the 225 indicator. Once you said yes, it rewrites back the calibration to the card that you replaced. That is as non-volatile as you can give for any scale calibration in the world today.
In conclusion, we stepped all through the processes of the benefits for you. The anti debris buildup features, the simple connections to the scale, how robust and heavy duty the scale is, and the diagnostics that we looked at, whether it be there in the scale house or over the phone with the Central Carolina Scale technician. This allows us to make sure we could get out there and make the repairs quickly.
Now let’s talk about the next level. You’ve probably never seen something like this before when it comes to a truck scale. It’s called iSite. Cardinal Scale software in the cloud in which all the error messages or anything that may happen to this scale can go up to the cloud and alert you within minutes of when there’s a failure or a problem, difficulty with the scale, you’ll probably know before just about anyone else in the scale house.
When you purchase a Cardinal Digital Truck Scale you simply let us know that you want your truck scale on iSite, then you’ll provide us an email address or the telephone number where you want email alerts or text messages sent. The messages could be sent to our scale technicians, it could be a customer’s location where there are six Cardinal digital truck scales and you want the site manager to get an error message. That’s specifically up to you and how you want it set up. You might prefer not to be bothered by the alerts and just let the sophisticated Cardinal 225 indicator provide any diagnostics that are needed. That is fine as well.
Let’s reinforce the ease of use on a Cardinal Armor SmartCell digital truck scale system. This is an easy to use scale. As we’ve gone over in this article, a scale attendant could look at the 225 weight controller and give the scale technician the Diagnostics via phone. Or you can also rely on the iSite web based software that gives the scale company and/or the customer remote diagnostics. The scale is easy to calibrate and saves the calibration in several places, ideal for indicator repairs.
We encourage you to contact us either by phone (919) 776-7737 or fill out our Request a Quote form on our website and we will follow up with additional information.