Arduino + Force gauge

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

Hi everybody!

I'm new at Arduino (although not new at electronics) and I thinking about a project that i'm not really sure about its feasability.

What i want to do is to use a force gauge to measure a force for certain time. This gauge has a USB (or RS232, cant remember) port to connect to a PC, insted of that, i want to connect it to an Arduino, it will get all the samples (let's say 1000Hz for 1 sec, so 1000 samples), process and integrate them and show me the result in a standard display.

The result will be something like the shadowed area:

I know that the unit is 'Force * Time' and don't really makes much sense, but that's what i need.

So, can it be done? Using the Arduino UNO is good enough?
Would a need to use something like a MAX232 to go from the Force Gauge to Arduino or is there some adapter/shield that does this? Or meaby the USB port that comes with the Arduino to program it would do the job?

Thanks in advance!
Greetings from Argentina

2

Force times time is impulse, and that's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to measure.

Reading your sensor via USB is going to be hard. The two sides of a USB connection are not the same. What your Arduino has is a peripheral port. This is designed to connect to a host port on the PC. Your sensor will probably also have a peripheral port, and you would need to add a host port to the Arduino and then get/write the software to drive the USB, and the the application protocol that your force sensor produces, to read the sample values.

I think you will find it far easier to get a new force sensor with an output that you can read directly. There are any number of sources, but for example several different types are listed here:

http://proto-pic.co.uk/categories/Sensors/Flex-%26-Force-Sensors/