Numbers stations are / were spooky shortwave radio stations, best known from the Cold War, which broadcast human voices reading numbers, usually in groups of five. It’s widely assumed these were / are used by many nations for communicating with secret agents in foreign countries, using an unbreakable one-time pad cipher.
You can spook yourself by listening to The Conet Project.
Or you can code a BBC micro:bit to be come your very own numbers station!
Use one of the micro:bit Python editors (such as the lovely new official online one) to flash the program below on to a micro:bit. If you have a micro:bit V2 you can hear the numbers from the built-in speaker, otherwise attach some headphones or an amplified speaker to pin 0 and GND.
If someone can add some code to play The Lincolnshire Poacher as well, I’d be very happy indeed.
from microbit import *
import speech
import random
numbers = ['zero', 'won', 'too', 'three', 'for',
'five', 'six', 'seven', 'ate', 'nine']
while True:
for i in range(5):
speech.say(random.choice(numbers))
sleep(500)
sleep(1000)