Maker creates a fully-functioning, self-contained Enigma machine that you can wear on your wrist.
Though the jury may still be out when it comes to widespread smartwatch adoption, you can’t help but want to adorn your wrist with this DIY project. Designed by Maker “Asciimation” the Enigma wristwatch is a fully-functional, self-contained device that replicates the original cryptographic machine, which was used to cipher secret messages in the 20th century. Early versions of the so-called uncrackable tool had been made available starting in the early 1920s, and adopted by the military and government services of several countries including Germany.
Inspired by a recent trip to Bletchley Park, home of the WW2 code breakers, the Maker decided to build his own three-rotor Enigma machine and housed it in a wristwatch.
“To cut a long story short my aim is to recreate a Bombe using Orwell, the little 8-bit computer I have built. In order to know how a Bombe works you need to know how an Enigma machine works (and is used). And the best way to know how something works is to build it yourself,” he writes.
Driven by an Arduino Pro Mini (ATmega328), the wearable features an OLED screen with a resolution of 128 x 64, a three brass button interface and a LiPo battery. In addition, the device is equipped with an on/off switch and a recharging socket along its left and right side, respectively.
As you can imagine, a number of button presses are required to set up each of the three encoder wheels. Its two leftmost buttons act as directional selectors, while the rightmost button is used to choose items from its interface. Side-to-side selections are indicated on the display by left and right arrows.
After turning on the machine, any key press will take you through a series of screens to view and adjust its settings, ranging from its rotor to plug board to reflectors, before finally arriving at the encoder. From there, the left and right buttons let you select the letter to encode. As you encode each one, the display reveals the current rotor positions and the encoded letter in a ticker. The ticker shows five letter groups as this is how Enigma messages were transmitted by radio.
You read all about it on its official page here, or watch it in action below.
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