Muon Sortes is a desk object that asks the universe questions on your behalf. Inside a walnut-faced enclosure, four Geiger-Muller tubes sit in a 2x2 array watching for cosmic ray muons: particles born high in the atmosphere when something old and fast from deep space collides with the air. When a muon punches through two of the tubes within microseconds of each other, the device knows it caught a real muon rather than ordinary background radiation, and that arrival is used to sample a free-running hardware counter into a true random number with no terrestrial cause. A large e-ink screen shows the time, the live count rate, temperature and pressure, weather and space-weather data, and a rotating set of clock faces and slow ambient games driven by the same muon events. Press the oracle button, ask a question, and the answer waits until a particle from the sky arrives to settle it. Everything the device sees is logged and served over WiFi through a web dashboard, a REST API, and MQTT, so the detector can also feed your own projects.
The name is Latin. Sortes were lots drawn to put a question to the gods, and a muon is the closest thing to a messenger from outside the world that will pass through your ceiling on its own. Reserve a numbered unit here, or read the full build log to see it come together on the bench.