Smart adaptable strain gage conditioner

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 strain gage thermal output. 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 a FPGA including a core processor. Description of the methodology developed for the temperature compensation of the system and the architecture implementation results are reported.