This project provides a simple application that will monitor and record weight data from electronic scales connected to serial ports (including USB-to-serial-port adapters). It is written in Java and uses the Swing toolkit to provide a friendly GUI interface.

This project is pretty self-contained. You will need to have Java installed as well as Apache Ant.

Serial port support is provided by the RXTX library. Presently Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are all supported.

This project uses Launch4J to create an executable that will start the application on Windows. It also uses IzPack to create a cross-platform installer.

You will need to install both of these packages and then set the appropriate paths in the "build.properties" file. A sample properties file is provided, simply copy this file and customize its values.

Building the project is easy. Once you have installed the pre-requisites and customized the "build.properties" file, run Ant from the root directory. All of the other required libraries are bundled with the project.

I know that checking the library files into the project is a bad idea, but I haven't had time to set the project up with Maven 2. This is on my to-do list!

Once you have built the application, all of the interesting bits will be in the "dist" folder.

• "ScaleMonitor" contains a copy of the Java distribution. This includes the main JAR file and all of the required libraries. There will also be a ZIP archive with the same contents.

• "scalemonitor-windows" contains the Windows distribution, including a Windows launcher. There will also be a ZIP archive with the same contents.

• If you are building on Mac OS X, there will be a "ScaleMonitor.app" folder that contains the Macintosh distribution. There will also be a ZIP archive with the same contents.

The Mac OS X distribution is only built when you're building on Macintosh. The build process copies a stub file for launching the application that is only present on Macintosh.

If you are running the application from the Java distribution you will need to set the library path.

java -Djava.library.path=resources -jar ScaleMonitor.jar

The launchers on Windows and Macintosh set the library path for you already.

I used IntelliJ IDEA 7 to design the Swing forms. This worked great, but to make any changes to the forms you'll need to continue to use IDEA (or port the forms to another tool, i.e. NetBeans). This isn't as bad as it sounds, there is a "Community Edition" of IDEA available. I will need to port these forms, it's unlikely they will cleanly build under IDEA 10 (but you never know).

If you find this project useful and make any changes, please fork and send me a pull request! I wrote this application for a good friend of mine that had a bunch of scales attached to a proprietary interface that had ceased functioning. She uses the AND EW 300A and that's the only supported scale right now. I'm sure this application would work with other serial port scales, but right now this is the only one she uses, so it's the only one I have available for testing.