CAS is a South Korea–based manufacturer of industrial and commercial weighing scales. In this week’s article, we will discuss how to interact with those scales from our Peakboard application. Spoiler: It’s easy!
Set up the CAS extension
The CAS extension is available for download directly in the designer. More information is available on the Peakboard Extension Page or in the technical documentation on Github along with the source code.
Once installed, there are four different list types available. As of the beginning of 2026, there are two series of scales supported: PDN and PB2. Each of them supports two different types of ECR protocols. For the PDN series, we will use the ECR 14 protocol.
When the scale is plugged into the USB port, it automatically emulates a virtual COM port. In that case, we need to look up the COM port in the Windows Device Manager settings. There might be other COM emulations or regular COM ports, so the COM port number differs from system to system. Of course, the regular non-virtual COM port can also be used as long as the Peakboard runtime runs on a machine with a physical port.
The COM port is the only thing that needs to be carefully configured in the extension parameters, followed by a reload to ensure the metadata of the data source is set correctly. For this type of scale, the scale actively pushes the current weight to the COM port. That’s why the data source doesn’t have a reload interval. It’s a push data source that triggers a reload event every time data is pushed.
Different protocols ECR 12 and ECR 14
The data that is exchanged through COM communication is not standardized. That’s why the PDN scale supports many different protocols depending mostly on which protocol is expected by the connected systems—typically the different POS manufacturers. The preferred protocol can be easily configured in the scale as described in the manual. In our example, we’re using ECR 14, which is a very simple streaming of the weight value and nothing else. The more sophisticated ECR 12, which is also supported by the Extension, doesn’t actively stream. When using ECR 12, the weight must be requested by calling the function GetWeight, which is NOT necessary with ECR 14. It also supports resetting the scale to zero by calling SetZero.
Build the example
For our example we only need to bind the output of the data source to a text field and format the number correctly. That’s all.
The video shows the Peakboard scale in action. The data transfer between the scale and the Peakboard application is happening literally without any delay.
Demo Use Case with Austrian dessert
In the last part of this article, we want to take a look at a ready-to-use template that can be downloaded here. The idea is that the user can choose between different recipes. In this case, it’s all about Austrian special dessert dishes.
When a recipe has been selected, the application shows the ingredients to add one after the other. The scale displays the current weight in real-time, and the user is supposed to add the indicated ingredient until the weight is correct. Then the user can confirm the step, and the scale is reset for the next ingredient.
