This device is so cool-looking, I almost don't care what it actually is.
But I'll explain. If you're an industrial designer, when you hear "deflectometer" you probably picture the machine that tests how far a material will deflect; you may have seen one in a chair factory. However, to civil engineers, a deflectometer is an object you tow on a trailer. This type of deflectometer is filled with weights and sensors, and fancy software lets it evaluate, inch by inch, the road surface it's traveling over. They look like this:
