HX711 – Dynamometer part 1

Grip strength can be used as a measure of overtraining.

There are ADC + strain gauge meters on ebay for hobby bodyweight scales (HX711) that should be good for measuring up to around 200kgs. I ordered one and plan to put the gauges between a pair of half cylinders of wood to measure grip strength.

The HX711 can communicate with microcontrollers with a 2 wire interface like I2C. I’ve gotten this working with the Nucleo and tested it by having the Nucleo output a sin wave and reading the voltage that the HX711 measured.

project stuff here, remember that all the Nucleo stuff is compiled using the mbed compiler

Voltage measured by the HX711. Output is in two’s complement, which is why the sin wave is split between top and bottom. You can see the quantization in the DACs output because there’s a minimum 64 fold amplification for the HX711. This means that even a tiny voltage swing will saturate the output.

Author: Garth Whelan

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