Electronic – arduino – Micro Pressure Sensors for arduino

arduinosensor

I'll preface this with a little background. I'm a software engineer with little experience outside of a couple small arduino projects. I'm excited about the idea of combining both digital and physical components with frameworks/hardware such as arduino.

My question is:
Are there any small/micro pressure sensors compatible with arduino? The idea would be to detect balance/distribution abnormalities in packaging.

Example:
A grid comprised of 100×100 (the more the better) sensors used to recognize the weight distribution of a box or container (increased pressure on some sensors vs decreased pressure on others). Container dimensions are roughly 2' x 2' x 4' [lwh] and must remain upright. The height of the box is what makes the weight distribution important for stability.

Is this possible with arduino? If so, what hardware would I need? If not, is there something else I should be using?

Thanks all!

Best Answer

Somehow I feel that physics (especially mechanics) might hold a better answer than just throwing a matrix of sensors, which as @clabacchio says, is going to cost a nice little fortune.

Based on the material that the box (especially it's base, the bottom 2'x2' surface), you can choose various approaches as well.

What I mean is, things like -

  • Checking tension in a grid of supporting wires that take the load of the box when placed on the grid
  • Checking pressure on a grid of metal plates (i.e. you need not have an individual sensor covering each inch of the base)

Finally, "optics" could be a solution. There's a funky lot you can do with lasers (beam obstruction), or even with a good camera and some image processing. Of course, the last one (image processing) is not really a good option on Arduino.

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