The hedgehogs are illuminated by a bunch of infrared LEDs purchased from Radio Shack. We'd like to convert the cam to Linux, or anything else that will run on the hardware we have. Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, and the hedgehog eye, too, as far as we know. The colors we see are caused by objects absorbing various portions of white visible light, and reflecting the rest. All of this light is absent in infrared light.
Various objects reflect various amounts and wavelengths of infrared light.
This permits an image to be created, but there isn't any color information that would make sense to us. Therefore, the most commonly used infrared photographic techniques produce black and white images. His name is Tux. Of course not. Every once in a while, the picture gets messed up for a little while.