Inventor George Yu uses NODE to take his own temperature, which displays on an iPad.

Some would say there wasn't much daring innovation at CES 2013. With the gadget industry so cutthroat and more interesting things happening in software, big manufacturers like Samsung and LG Electronics avoided showing the work that went on in their R&D labs. And so it was left to scrappy entrepreneurs like George Yu to put the most intriguing devices on show. Yu's invention is NODE, a hand-held, cylindrical sensor that integrates with an iPhone to help analyze the world around its user.

Shaped like a large battery, it has echoes of Star Trek's tricorder when used with a smartphone. For the initiated, "tricorders" were handheld devices that could scan life-signs in a dark cave or the chemical composition strange, alien objects, sometimes by waving a cylindrical second scanner over the object. NODE is a bit like this second scanner, turning an iPhone into the main "tricorder-like" reader.

While similar gadgets like Scanadu (also at CES) focused solely on health, NODE wants to be a jack-of-all-trades sensor. For now, it can analyze ambient room temperature, moisture in the air, light concentration or color, displaying its readings on an iPhone or iPad. Point both NODE and an iPhone at an object being scanned and you can take a photo that displays the numerical reading on the image. That could be useful for photographing installation leakages on a window or checking for safe food temperatures, then sending that information to someone else to be categorized.

Users can take these various scans by popping different sensors on and off, which are bought separately for about $25. The base device costs $149. "You can create your own Swiss army knife," says Yu, adding that NODE's "modular" nature is its unique selling point.

Yu has sold about 1,000 devices to date through Kickstarter and his Variable Technologies website. He's also in talks with a few retailers, and plans to release more sensors for the device in the next year: one that can sense carbon monoxide and another than can measure the distance between objects.

As inventors often are, Yu is quiet and unassuming. Wearing a grey suit with no tie, Yu demoed the gadget to Forbes at CES 2013 and used it to take his own temperature, pointing the device's laser at his forehead. He came up with the idea for this after working for three years at NASA on a project for the Department of Homeland Security -- building a handheld, chemical gas sensor that plugged onto the back of an iPhone. The device, called Cell-All, got some press attention in 2011 as a "poison-smelling" gadget, but the government pulled funding for it in 2011.

Undeterred, Yu plugged away at the project in his own time and made a fundmental change: instead of a device that physically plugged into a phone, he'd make it wirelessly sync with the device via Bluetooth.

NODE is one inch in diameter and weighs 45 grams.

Yu turned his living room into a lab filled with machines and electronics, then built the first NODE prototype in early 2012. He hired a couple of engineers and in September 2011, eleven months after coming up with the idea, began shipping the first NODE devices to Kickstarter investors.

Today Yu continues to base himself in Chattanooga, Tenn. where his wife is a college professor in computer science, and he has five employees. The NODE device is assembled locally, though components come from Asia. He raised $155,000 from Kickstarter last year, and further cash from angel investors.

Yu wants to ship at least 10,000 more NODE devices this year, "ramp up" operations and get further investment. An Android version of the complimentary NODE app will be coming "in a month or so," he adds, which should open up the market for him significantly.

Meanwhile other app makers can make services that integrate with the NODE device. Yu has worked with developer Figure 8 to create a separate app that identifies and matches colors, potentially of use to the paint industry. There's no single most popular application for the device, he says. One hot air balloon enthusiast uses it as a pressure sensor. Others use it for refrigeration. Having recently become a father, Yu has used NODE to check his child's temperature, and ambient temperature in the room. "I caught myself having a fever at Thanksgiving, too," he adds. "People can take it and make it their own."

The possibilities for use are broad enough that if NODE can make the difficult transition out of being a novelty gadget, the next step would be something as useful as a Swiss army knife -- or maybe even a tricorder.