Wow! thank you for such a detailed response. Itās taken me most of the day to digest it.
I totally get what you are saying about wasting huge amounts of time to save a small amount of money. Iām inclined to be a penny pincher and I do have to stop myself often from doing this.
Having said that, there is a lot of satisfaction to be had from making something from low cost items. Making weight monitors for my beehives is my winter project so Iām prepared to spend quite a bit of time on it. If it was all just plug and play then Iāll end up filling my time with boring DIY, painting rooms etc. Iād like to get back into programming so the project ticks a few boxes for me.
I have 10 garden hives and the goal Iāve set myself is to monitor their weight for under 20 pounds per hive (~24 euros). This means sharing as many components as possible between hives and cutting all unnecessary things. I donāt need it to be super accurate because ultimately all Iām interested in is swarm detection. My provisional design is a bar scale that weighs half the hive. Iāve got a set of cheapo bathroom load cells to play with, but I may upgrade them to the steel version that the commercial beehive monitoring guys seem to use (which various Chinese sellers sell under different load cell model names SC134, GML670, AM21A, TAL107, M-001 etc with full/half-bridge versions).
To cut costs one idea Iāve been toying with is to use the microcontroller internal thermometer instead of buying a dedicated thermometer. Initial testing though has shown the thermometer on the ESP32-C6 to be way off. Itās at least 18 degrees too low. Whether that is just a simple offset or some huge calibration issue I have yet to investigate. Iāve got it uploading data to beep.nl via code from Prusa Hive.
So that is some background to why Iām interested in the CS1237 with its built in thermometer. Another option is the HX710A which apparently also has a temperature sensor. The TM7711 is listed as an alternative for the latter, but Iāve yet to see a reference to a temperature sensor (although I havenāt gone as far yet as translating data sheets). Boards for all of these are around the same price.
ADS1220 boards are not too expensive if sourced from aliexpress, but whether they are genuine, who knows?
The lack of power line cycle interference rejection shouldnāt be a problem on battery power? Presumably the TL431 is there to solve some of the CS1237ās deficiencies? I couldnāt find the ppm/Ā°C for the HX711, maybe it is just as bad?
The second link takes me to a HX711 board, but if it still isnāt working then you should be able to find it by searching ātl431 hx711ā.
Cheers
Adam