EveryDay Life The Enigma Replica

Caracteristics & infos

Each time you press a letter, the rotors turns, so you never get the same combination (unless the rotor make a complete rotation). The electric signal is mixed in the rotors, and come back in the machine in an other letter's path, and is shown on a light board.

The key to decypher the message was the rotor inital position, the wiring of the plugboard (an other level of encryption), and the rotor order. But those parameters were changing each day at midnight (I highly recommend you to watch the movie "the imitation game to really understand the working mechnaism of the machine").

Now let's talk about how this machine was made. We used an arduino Mega with its 52 digtal IO ports, to which we pluged 26 wires (corresponding to the 26 letters of the alphabet). Each wire then splits in two. One part goes to the leds panels, and the other part goes to the rotors. The led panels shows the letter being cyphered, and the letter cyphered.

The rotors are fully 3D printed (link to the parts at the bottom). They are about 10cm wide and turn around a 1cm axis. Between the rotors, there is small metallic shperes (5mm in diameter) which make contact between some vises' head. But the rotors are in plastic and they don't have a great elasticity. So between the vises and the spheres we put iron wool (very thin iron wire which can conduct electricity but can also take fire...). This wool act like a pillow and add elasticity to make contact easier.

The electric signal coming back from the rotors then go again in the arduino which analyse the signal and determine the cyphered letter. A software I wrote displays the mechanisme inside the machine, as well as the starting and ending letter. Go check this software here