After Martins fire, and have a near miss myself I am planning to build a fire detection system for my laser. I am already building an Axolotl temperature sensor system (which I am logging at the moment) so when that is complete I will have a look at using a similar system for fire detection. Whilst the temp sensor is being finished I am going to log the temperature in the laser to see what sort of range I am dealing with. For this I am going to use the chipkit / arduino prototype for the Axolotl system and write something simple to monitor the com port on the PC.
I will strip the LED and buzzer off and hook up the temp sensor directly.
More details and code will be published when I have it hooked up.