Anyone faced with such a situation can understand the embarrassment of either unloading the luggage among prying eyes or shelling out a fortune for the extra baggage. All because weighing the luggage before stepping out of home is never an easy option.

But there’s a solution in hand: a team of students from the Textile Technology department of the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi have invented a suitcase with an in-built weighing machine that can tell the amount of luggage being carried. A team effort carried out by third year BTech students Aaina Garg, Jasleen Bhasin, Priyanka Malik and Shravni Jain, the suitcase has a battery-operated LCD monitor that tells the exact weight.

Though not for sale, the blue-coloured suitcase is estimated to be worth Rs 3,000 and can carry up to 50 kg load.

“We always faced the problem of weighing our luggage before a flight, especially an international flight,” Bhasin says. “When we were asked to design an innovative item for our designing and development programme, we thought making a built-in suitcase (to measure its own weight) would be ideal.”

But, as the cliché goes, easier said than done. Once the proposal was submitted, the students realised that making the suitcase involved learning about electricity, digital signals and battery mechanism — areas not part of the Textile Technology syllabus.

“The basic idea was to modify a suitcase to suit our needs,” Jain says, “so we bought a suitcase and ran from department to department trying to learn more about mechanical and electrical engineering.

“We also surfed the Net and spent a lot of time researching on it.”

Another big hurdle was to focus the entire burden on one area from were the load could be measured. To tackle this, the team replaced the suitcase’s base with a wooden board and placed a load cell underneath it. The cell was then connected to a battery that changes electrical signal into digital signal and displays it on the monitor.