Hi Neal,
Can you tell us a bit more about your project?
(1) What weights are you planning on weighing?
(2) What accuracy do you need?
(3) what is you cost limit?
(4) Do you have the tools and experience to build and test electronic units?
If you go the microcontroller route the problem to solve is how to get the weight data into the microcontroller. Once that is achieved writing the code to set limits, display the results or pretty much anything else would be relatively straight-forward.
Here are the main options for getting the weight data:
(1) Buy some scales with a digital output, probably serial.
(2) Modify some standard scales which do not have a digital output to get a digital output.
(3) Build some scales from scratch.
(1) would be the simplest and quickest but scales with a digital output are liable to be expensive, but I do not know that for sure.
(2) Is an unknown quantity, but technically possible.
(3) Is not as radical as it might first seem. You can get strain gauges with a digital interface (or analog), so it would be a matter of building the mechanics, or perhaps adapting the mechanics from another scale.
spec