Kid's Game to Enigma Machine

I took a kid's game I picked up at the local thrift store and changed it into an Engima machine. An Enigma machine is a device used to encrypt and decrypt data. It was widely used by the Nazi's, and the work leading to breaking the code was important to computer science, cryptography, and cryptanalysis in many ways, and the code breaking is just a really cool story (at least for nerds).

Notice it plays Yankee Doodle at the beginning, it should maybe play God Save the Queen instead since the British were the ones who seemed to be doing the majority of the work to crack the code, but we all get along now (I think we're past the American Revolution by now).

You can see my Instructable on how to build this here http://www.instructables.com/id/Kids-Game-to-Arduino-Enigma-Machine/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• arduino
• enigma
• electronics

[Pakoslaw122]

Nice work, but you suck at history, if you say that British broke Enigma. Your device should rather play polish national anthem :)

[sketchsk3tch]

@Pakoslaw122 Thanks for you input. My understanding is that Polish Cipher Bureau cracked a pre-war Enigma. The one the German's actually used was changed to be more secure. Quoting from Wikipedia "Polish Cipher Bureau to break into the pre-war Enigma system as early as 1932. However, from 1940 on, the Germans changed the procedures to increase the security." I don't mean to minimize the importance of what the Polish Cipher Bureau did, without it the allies may have never cracked the code.

[skrolnik]

Yes, but will it call E.T.’s mothership back before it’s too late?

[GortMcTabs]

Grats, you made slashdot

[singingbanana]

I love this :) I look after an enigma machine (there's a video on my page). But this is a lot of fun.