Following the fast development pace of the electronic technology and sensor technologies, the weight scaling products has entered a fast development phase, the functions of it are changing from “Single machine operation” to “data gathering” and then to “Centralized managements”. The traditional network types of this field is RS-485 networks, but as the development of the technology, the user has more and more requirements on the scales, such as small area management, higher integration, intelligence functions, and better network supports, from the network aspects, to meet these requirements, scales designers have to focus more on higher network reliability and communication speeds.

The development of the Ethernet network technology is extremely fast in these few years; as more and more device supports the Ethernet interface, the scale industry is also affect by this trend, the following is the advantages on using Ethernet networks, these advantages bring great potentials to the application of Ethernet on scale products.

(1) For the commercial application field, such as supermarket and POS machine, Ethernet network is very common; and usually there will be PCs in these places for management purpose.

(2) For the industrial application field, the requirements on communications usually would be faster rate, longer distance, and wider range, all these can be satisfy using the Ethernet network.

(3) For the special application environment, such as railway station, airports, there is no place for additional wiring for scales, but usually these places have ready Ethernet network.

Slow communication rate, complicated maintenance, high cost on wiring, all these are the disadvantages of the traditional RS-485 bus. So, improve the products functions and performance becomes the necessary means to satisfy the increasing requirements to the product. Combining the advantages of the Ethernet network (TCP/IP) to the traditional device, we had designed a complete solution to solve the above mentions problems, the following is its application on super market terminal.

 The super market sales terminal should not only have the weight scale function, but also it should be able to communicate with the management center. Most super market has installed with Ethernet network, so utilize the already exist Ethernet network is the most convenient and reliable communication solution for the weight scales to communicate with the data center.

Figure 1: Super market weight scale network management system

As Figure 1 shows, one of the famous electric weight scale manufacturer has embedded the ZNE-100TL module to their electric weight scales to provide a network interface for communication. When using this weight scale, super market can utilize their existing Ethernet network to achieve the local monitoring and remote management to the weighting data, and the installation is very simple, no additional wiring is required. For this reason, this type of weight scale is very popular in the super markets.
 For airport, bus stations, and other similar places, the environment does not allow additional wiring and network installations; so the already existed network in these places becomes the only way to establish a network system. Since the widely application of the Ethernet, usually the existed network in these places is Ethernet network, the following is an application case of our NETCOM-100 Serial to Ethernet device on an airport luggage weighting system, showing that the convenience on applying our serial to Ethernet device to establish a perfect solution for these special application environments
 
Figure 2 Airport Networking weighting system

　　As Figure 2 shows, the weight scale of the airport luggage management system is a serial device, its task is to gather the weight values and complete the font line handling of the data. NETCOM-100 device here can connect the weight scale to the Ethernet, and establish a transparent data communication channel between the data center and the weight scale; by this way the management terminal and data server can utilize the existing Ethernet within the airport to achieve the communication with the serial outputted weight scales.