muon sortes / hanoi bench

context: I'm building an e-ink smart clock, that uses 4x geiger counters to detect muons/high energy particles, and uses that to give users a cosmic oracle experience, and RNG based games/events. Press a button, ask a question, then a cosmic ray hitting the earths upper atmosphere answers.

It's been a few weeks since the last update and a lot has happened, so this is going to be a longer one covering multiple milestones. I switched display panels mid-build, laser-cut an acrylic scaffold for four J305 tubes, brought up a single tube on high voltage, then rebuilt for two-channel coincidence and started chasing noise.

Before the HV boost modules arrive (40 days in transit), I wanted to validate as much of the detection circuit as possible using just the ESP32 itself. The idea is simple: use one GPIO as a signal generator to inject fake pulses into the front end, and use another GPIO to listen for interrupts at the output. If the right number of pulses come out the other end with the right timing, the chain works.

With the schematics drawn and parts sorted into their labeled bins, it was finally time to start populating a breadboard. The plan was to build the entire digital chain first: pulse shaping, stretching, re-squaring, and the coincidence AND gate. Without any of the analog front-end, and definitely without any HV anywhere on the bench.

I have been thinking about building a muon-based RNG device ever since watching an Alpha Phoenix video on YouTube. It seemed like such a cool way to have a direct connection to both sub-atomic and astronomical scales. I mulled the idea around for ~2 years and finally decided to pull the trigger.