Measuring displacement of a point or surface, rather than measuring the deformation of a flexure, offers many possibilities for compact, low-cost load cells. This page gathers some resources on this topic and presents work towards a simple six degree-of-freedom (DOF) loadcell based on these ideas.
One way to determine the proximity of two surfaces is by measuring the capacitance between them. <ahref='http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/862.16/people/sam.calisch/project/index.html'>This page</a> documents experiments with a 3 DOF Capacitive load cell using a single printed circuit board.
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It is based on a discrete electrostatics solver (shown below), and also documented on the page above.
