The moon orbits Earth every 27.3 days. It doesn’t have leap years; it doesn’t have some months when it takes 30 days, or 31, like our silly calendar months. Give a person (or, in this case, a Raspberry Pi Pico W) a date in time, present or past, and they’ll be able to tell you what the moon looked like on that day using a really simple formula.

If you were to take that knowledge and add a hollow, light-up model of the moon, a motor board from Kitronik, and a Raspberry Pi Pico, you might come up with a device like this by Lorraine Underwood. It’s very simple: you just enter a date, and the light inside the moon moves to show the phase of the moon on that date. We don’t have any more information than that at this stage, but Lorraine’s working on a build video for Element 14 that will reveal all.