Light Cryptalk is an Arduino-powered Enigma

An Enigma machine refers to a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used in the twentieth century for enciphering and deciphering secret messages. The original Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. According to Wikipedia, early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, although they were later adopted by a number of militaries and governments around the world.

Recently, a young Maker by the name of Michele Lizzit built his own version of the classic cipher machine using an Atmel-powered (SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3) Arduino Due.

“The idea of the Maker Faire project came to me when Google dedicated a doodle to Alan Turing. Reading on Wikipedia his story I’ve learned about the Enigma machine. This project was initially realized to be presented as final project of Middle School (junior high – seventh grade). In the first version I used Xbee to transmit and cryptography was just a table substitution,” Lizzit told Zoe Romano of the official Arduino blog.

“I use Linux for everything I do with my computer and I am very grateful to the open source community and to Arduino for making available online for free a huge amount of documentation. I believe that it is important to share your ideas freely and for free so that others like me can learn and so that the opportunities to know, learn and make do not remain available only to those who can spend more.”

Unsurprisingly, Light Cryptalk isn’t the only modern interpretation of the classic Enigma machine to use an Atmel-based Arduino board. Back in October, the folks at ST-Geotronics created a functioning open-source Enigma (M4) replica powered by an Atmel-based Arduino Mega (ATmega1280).