Introduction The MuonPi project provides a distributed IoT network of inexpensive, RPi-based particle detectors for measuring the high-energy muon showers generated by cosmic primary radiation. By recording and timestamping these events at the individual detectors down to the nanosecond level, correlations and thus information on the shower geometry and energy can be derived from the data collected centrally on a server. The hardware of the detectors utilize an RPi add-on board (HAT), which was intentionally designed as cost-effective as possible in order to target a broad community of interested users, such as radio HAMs, makers, schools etc. In this way, the wide distribution of detector stations potentially brings new insights into the world of astro-particle physics at the highest energies of the universe.