Within the firearms community, there exists a subset of people who reload spent cartridges. While this endeavor can be very rewarding, it is not without its risks; the biggest being the possibility of either using too much or too little gunpowder. While there are many methods on the market to dispense gunpowder, many are either cumbersome, lack accuracy over a given range, or just not easy to use; any of which can lead to errors and possibly serious repercussions.
For this project, I wanted to build a device that encompasses the best of all worlds; easy to use, accurate over a wide range of weights and dispensing directly into a cartridge to avoid accidental dispensing of too much or too little powder, both of which can have serious consequences.
To facilitate this project, competitive products were researched and a set of specifications was decided upon. With the specifications solidified, component selection was started by comparing critical operations with parts availability. In this case, due to the nature of the data I was working with, a 32-bit microcontroller with floating point computational capabilities was required and to implement the ease of use, a 7” LCD touchscreen with 800x480 resolution was decided upon.
