I have been slowly catching up on my unread back issues of Make magazine. By a kismet-style coincidence, I just now came across Charles Platt's Get a Grip article in issue 52. It's a design for a DIY carnival grip strength tester.

The thing that caught my attention as I paged through the magazine was the diagram of a Wheatstone bridge, an integral part of any discussion of strain gauges and load cells.

I probably won't be using any elements of this DIY approach, instead opting for off-the-shelf components. It was just startling for me to come across this within a day or two of starting to think about using bathroom scale load sensors.