Smart adaptable strain gage conditioner: hardware/software implementation

In this paper, a smart adaptable strain gage conditioning system is presented. The system is based on analog and digital processing to meet particularly adaptability, flexibility, and complex computations required in calibration and compensation algorithms of apparent strain in strain gage. Analog processing, with adequate amplification and filtering, is used to adjust the strain gage and temperature signals to the full scale of the converters. The flexibility of the digital processing is used to compute automatic calibration and temperature compensations when strain gage and spring element characteristics are known or not. This new architecture, consisting of hardware and software functionality, is implemented on an FPGA including a core processor. Description of the methodology developed for the temperature compensation of the system, the architecture implementation results, and adaptation of the system are reported.