But how do you know (unless you use some reading from somewhere other than the Load Cell) whether you are over or under 0 kg? As I noted, +5 kg and -5 kg will both give you exactly the same Load Cell reading, so unless you have another way to indicate the sign of the reading (which amounts to a 17th "bit" of information), you are out of luck. Note that (as I noted) you could have things set up so there is a Front Panel Boolean switch that says "Compression" (positive load) and "Tension" (negative load) that could act as the "missing Bit", but if you think about going from 5 kg compression down to 0 down to 5 kg tension, as you describe the Load Cell, what you'll see is a decreasing value down to 0 followed by a discontinuity as it jumps to 65536. You could say "If I see discontinuities, I'll know I'm playing around 0", but you'll still have "sign" issues ...
Bob Schor
P.S. -- could you please tell us the name and model of this Load Cell? I want to see how the manufacturer describes it to see if it really is "cheating" by sending 17-bit data using 16-bit encoding ...
