Inexpensive thermal camera

Your usual thermal imaging camera costs thousands of dollars, often tens of thousands. Now a guy named Andy Rawson in the US has developed (with funding via Kickstarter) a much cheaper device called IR-Blue. It uses your iPhone (or many similar) to connect via Bluetooth to both display the thermal image and superimpose it on a visual image, as the video above will show.

The down side is that IR-Blue has very limited resolution with only 64 'zones' of IR image and those concentrated in a central band. So you won't get a detailed thermal image. That said, it's cheap ($160 kit or $195 assembled) and has real-world applications such as hot-spot-tracing. And for that price it's a fun thing to have ... and it does 'see' in the dark.

[My thanks to open-hardware enthusiast Andrew Back for pointing this out.]