Caprinometer 2000

Caprine - origin latin Caprinus - goat

I know many of you couldn’t sleep last night (and you may think it was over anxiety that UPS is going to pulverize your Glowforge into granules) but in truth that wasn’t it: You were worrying “how fast is my goat?” For those in the Boston area I am not referring to the speed of Tom Brady, but the 4-legged variety of goats.

So in reality this is a goat wearable. I know @Dan is now kicking himself right now thinking “damn, I could have gotten in on the ground floor of the burgeoning goat-wearable market, and instead I made a stupid laser…' .” Well have no fear folks, your needs have been answered. This is the caprinometer 2000, capable of measuring goat acceleration in 3 axes with a range of 200g +/- and sampling around 500hz. The case is made of clear acrylic. And mounted inside is an Adafruit Feather M0 datalogger with a 3-axis ADXL377 200g accelerometer breakout board It records onto a 32gb microSD card.

Now I realize many of your are wondering WTF? Well have you ever wondered why goats don’t get concussions? Most of the neurologists I have spoken to do a bunch of handwaving that basically is summed up “evolution”. Thanks. But why. So there are 3 possibilities: they are smart enough to not hit their heads with more than 95g of acceleration (having been rammed by a goat, I don’t think this is true - it was like getting hit by a linebacker), second they could have some anatomic structure in their skull which prevents traumatic brain injury and finally they could have some magical biochemical process which removes the tau proteins. In a series of 30 goat brain necropsies published in the literature none had evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE like the NFL players). So the first step is to record how hard they do actually whack their heads and how much of the impact is rotational (higher risk for concussion). So hence the caprinometer 2000. There are holes in the side for the nylon wire-ties that will hold it onto the base of the goat’s horn. I am awaiting IACUC approval for animal research to start the project, which since this is a straight observational study of natural behavior in their habitat is pretty easy to obtain - in my casual interactions with this herd they whack each other around 10x/hour.

The case was designed parametrically in OnShape