Here, let me tell you the Saga Of The Scale...

*ahem* A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...

...no, that's not right...

*ahem* It was a dark and stormy night...

...wait, that ain't it, either...

*ahem* Once upon a time, some years ago, Mom got a postal meter system from Pitney Bowes. It was okay. Not great, not terrible, just okay. Eventually we had to get rid of it for various reasons, but we kept the scale that came Free! with the meter system and priced-like-distilled-unicorn-blood ink. The scale was branded as a Pitney Bowes model G799. It worked great... until one day when it didn't...

For a while it wouldn't register weight properly, and thought that a couple pounds was a mere tenth of an ounce or so... then it just outright wouldn't turn on properly.

Keep in mind, throughout this adventure, that my troubleshooting skills are somewhere between sadly pathetic and "What's a troubleshooting, Mommy?" -- so forgive all my mistakes, please...

After some significant experimentation centered around a white wire that went nowhere (spoiler alert: complete and utter red herring! I suspect there was going to be a feature implemented with that wire that never was actually put into production...) I couldn't make it work and gave up.

Then I bought another G799, courtesy of fleaBay and a particularly seasick rendition of Andrew Jackson ;) and it arrived with the same exact issue. See, when the scale is turned on (with a button on the side, it's a "soft" power-on), it flashes every segment on the display for a second or so, then dashes for the weight, then zeros for ounces and tenths thereof. Neither scale would zero, it would freeze at the dashes.

The proper startup sequence looks like this --

(Please excuse my crappy photos -- my camera is a Kodak EasyShare from forever ago, it's only 7 MP... and sorry about the thumb, too, I'm all... well, you know... ;) )

So I sit and I think, okay, what exactly can break in a scale like this, during shipping? I'd had both apart, and I knew that it was not a circuit failure. There were exactly two even partially mechanical parts -- the load cell (which does the actual weighing, and is based on a Wheatstone bridge... tl;dr it's basically a high-precision force-sensitive resistor) and the power switch.

The power switch.

Hmmm.......

The original power switch for these scales, is a single button membrane keypad, with a steel dome inside and a rubber (ish) cover outside, held in place with Dave Jones' favorite (not!) -- hotsnot aka hot-melt glue. I used an X-Acto to peel off the rubber and switch, and to pry off the hotsnot. I then wired in a PC power switch (!) that I had lying around, momentary pushbutton type -- not really a tact switch, just a pushbutton meant to have a cap but without one. Suddenly the scale worked... and, futzing with the original switch, I soon figured out why. Look at this thing --

To quote Luke Skywalker: "What a piece of junk!" Boy, not a tenth of a penny to waste, ha! That little piece of flotsam would pop in (closed circuit), but not back out (open circuit) and was preventing the scale from working properly.

I replaced it permanently with a Radio Shack switch that I had on hand. If you have this scale, RUN DO NOT WALK to your nearest electronics supply house of choice and get yourself a replacement switch and put it in. It's really not hard, and it will save your scale! Here, have some pictures...

<rant>

I hope, by now, you can tell how much I like it when accountants play engineer with the stuff I buy. THIS RIGHT HERE is the reason that cheap crap floods the market for people to buy, swear at, and throw out. Money money money. Do NOT blame the sticker that says Made In China. I have seen some truly awful stuff that bragged about being made right here in Murrika. That didn't help it any, trust me. The problem has nothing whatsoever to do with where or who or what made what you buy at the local Mal*Mart or Borked Buy or [insert other horrible store bilking poorly designed and made crap here]...