This computer-controlled instrument has a battery life in excess of 16 h and fits on a circuit board that is 11.9 mm wide and 27.8 mm long. A programmable microcontroller digitizes the output of a single-axis accelerometer and stores up to 4096 acceleration values in memory. A personal computer can connect to the instrument and retrieve the data through a parallel port. The instrument can be calibrated on a small centrifuge, and the data have a linear relation to acceleration between 1 and 22 g (expandable to 50 g) with a resolution of 0.3 g. © 1999 American Institute of Physics.