Paranormal investigation kit for quadruped robots

Paranormal investigation as a hobby has a 30-year YouTube tradition (Ghost Adventures, Buzzfeed Unsolved) and a real consumer instrument market (REM-pods, K-II meters, full-spectrum cameras at $100-400 each). The methodology is genuinely interesting whether you believe in ghosts or not: a small instrument suite recording multiple physical channels (thermal gradient, electromagnetic field, ambient temperature, audio) over hours, looking for time-correlated anomalies that don't match ambient drift. Most existing rigs are handheld or static. A quadruped that walks slow, stops at marked waypoints, and logs everything continuously is a legitimate methodological upgrade — it covers more space, doesn't get tired, and produces timestamped data.

The addon is a single mountable plate with four instruments plus an SD-card logger: an FLIR Lepton 3.5 thermal camera (160×120, real radiometric data), a Mag-3 magnetometer (full 3-axis with 0.1µT resolution, way better than consumer K-II meters), a high-precision DS18B20 temperature probe sampling at 4Hz, and an INMP441 mic recording 24-bit/48kHz mono audio. All four log to a microSD. The ESP32-S3 controller correlates them — when any single channel spikes more than 3 standard deviations above its rolling baseline, it 'bookmarks' the timestamp across all channels for review the next morning.

What makes this useful even for skeptics is the ambient-baseline subtraction. Most consumer ghost-hunting hardware fires false positives constantly (every door opening, every passing car) because they don't compute a baseline. Our firmware computes a 5-minute rolling baseline per channel and only bookmarks deviations beyond it. Result: 95% fewer false positives. If you don't believe in ghosts, you have an excellent multi-channel environmental data logger for $200 that walks itself around overnight. If you do believe, you have a less-noisy way to spot 'real' anomalies.