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Muon Sortes

A desk clock that consults the sky.

An e-ink smart clock with a custom designed six channel muon detector: a connection to the cosmos on your desk. Every answer it gives comes from a real particle arrival on its 6 inch HD e-ink face.

The home dashboard is the default face. The Game of Life column grows from real detections, the tube channels widget shows all four Geiger-Müller tubes counting, and network data (weather, air quality, seismic) fills in around them. Every window is fully customizable and resizable, and the firmware is open source, so you can hook up any API feed you want.

Reserve your unit for $5 Read the build log
3D render of the Muon Sortes enclosure: milled aluminum body on a walnut base.
The one render on this page, and no AI renders anywhere. The enclosure is milled aluminum on a walnut base, and this spot gets real photos the day it exists. The PCB design is finished and confirmed; the designer is on the revision 1 enclosure now. Sign up to see pictures when it is ready.

How it works

A cosmic chain reaction, ending on your desk

Four steps, no black boxes. The whole chain is discrete logic you can trace on the schematic.

  1. A cosmic ray hits the atmosphere

    A proton from somewhere far away smashes into the upper atmosphere and sprays a shower of particles downward. Some of them are muons.

  2. Four tubes agree

    A 2x2 array of Geiger-Müller tubes feeds six pairwise coincidence gates. Two tubes firing together means one particle passed through both, not local noise.

  3. The arrival becomes a bit

    A counter free-runs at megahertz speed. The coincidence interrupt samples it at the exact moment of arrival. The low bits are as random as the arrival time, which is to say truly random.

  4. The clock answers

    Those bits drive the oracle, the games, and the procedural faces, while the e-ink panel shows the time, your environment, and the sky's answer.

Muons are constant and everywhere. Roughly one passes through every square centimeter of the world each minute, straight through the roof, the ceiling, and the clock. What is a muon, how coincidence detection works, and why cosmic rays make good randomness: the physics, in depth.

Faces

Example screens, rendered at native resolution

Every image below is unretouched output from the firmware that runs on the device today, captured at panel resolution. No render tricks, no concept art.

Home dashboard face showing clock, weather, environment readings, seismic activity, and per-tube counts.
Home dashboardWeather, environment, seismic activity, and live counts from all four tube channels.
Oracle face in its waiting state, listening for a four-tube coincidence.
The oracle waitsAsk a yes or no question and the clock listens until a coincidence arrives. Usually a few seconds.
Oracle result face showing the answer YES, decided by a muon event.
Answers arrive by muonThe bit comes from a free-running counter sampled at the instant of the strike. Nothing simulated.
Zenith polar sky map plotting recent muon coincidence events by arrival direction.
Sky mapA zenith-polar plot of recent events. Six coincidence channels give each arrival a rough direction.
Siege face, a lane defense game rendered in engraving style on the e-ink display.
Siege (beta)Lane defense powered by cosmic rays. Detected muons are the resource you spend on the keep.
Conway's Game of Life running full screen on the e-ink display.
Game of LifeConway's automaton at panel resolution, seeded from detector randomness.
Diffusion limited aggregation growing a dendritic pattern on the e-ink display.
DiffusionDiffusion limited aggregation. Each wandering particle takes its walk from real muon bits.
Abelian sandpile face showing a fractal avalanche pattern in grayscale.
SandpileAn abelian sandpile finding criticality, one grain and one avalanche at a time.
Rule 30 cellular automaton scrolling down the e-ink display.
Rule 30Wolfram's rule 30, the classic chaotic automaton, scrolling one row at a time.

Layouts

The home dashboard is a widget grid

Pick the widgets, sizes, and fonts from the built-in web dashboard, and run the panel black on white or white on black. Three arrangements of the same clock, same firmware:

Default home dashboard layout, black on white: clock, Game of Life column, weather, environment, seismic, tube channels.
Bench layout, black on whiteThe layout the prototype runs today.
Default home dashboard layout with the panel inverted, white on black.
Bench layout, white on blackSame layout with the panel polarity flipped.
Data desk layout: weather, environment, space weather, muon intervals, ISS tracker, air quality, tube channels, solar arc.
Data deskWeather, space weather, ISS pass, air quality, seismic, and the four tube channels.
Data desk layout inverted, white on black.
Data desk, invertedThe same grid at night polarity.
Observatory layout: large zenith sky map, muon interval histogram, per-tube CPM, moon phase, and a lifetime muon counter.
ObservatorySky map, interval histogram, per-tube rates, and the lifetime muon odometer.
Observatory layout inverted, white on black.
Observatory, invertedThe detector as a night instrument.

Reserve

Hold a place in the first batch

Reservations are open now. The Kickstarter campaign is planned for late 2026, and reserving early is how you get the low numbers.

Reserve your unit for $5. Credited toward your Kickstarter pledge. Fully refundable.

Founders Edition

$369
Units 010 to 029
  • Engraved unit number
  • Custom boot screen
  • First batch shipment
Reserve for $5

Early Backer

$399
Units 030 to 099
  • Engraved unit number
  • First batch shipment
Reserve for $5

Standard

$419
Batch 2
  • No engraved number
  • Ships after the first batch
Reserve for $5

Retail

$479
After the campaign
  • MSRP once the Kickstarter closes
  • Reserving now locks the lower price

Units 001 to 009 are held back for press, beta testing, and giveaways, and are never sold. A reservation is not a purchase: it holds your number and your tier, and you can refund it yourself at any time. Campaign timing is a plan, not a promise.

Hackable

Fully hackable, down to the muon

The firmware will be open source and the whole device is a platform. It speaks REST, WebSocket, and MQTT on your LAN, the dashboard layout is a JSON file, and the clock faces are C++ modules anyone can add to. When it ships, you get the code that runs it.

That turns the detector into an instrument in every sense. Route events through the dashboard's MIDI bridge and the universe plays your synths, one note per muon. Pull true random numbers from the REST API for your own projects. Or wire the coincidence stream into a slot machine and let the cosmos decide when you hit the jackpot.

It is all being built in public, one evening at a time on a bench in Hanoi. If you want to see how a cosmic ray detector actually gets made, the dev log is the honest version.

Read the dev log  ·  RSS  ·  Hackaday project