If you invest in an open-source, crowd-funded Enigma machine today, make it this one. Created by S&T Geotronics of Columbus, Georgia, this device first appeared as an Instructable and is now available as a full DIY for $250, which is quite a bit less than the Allies spent at Bletchley Park while trying to crack Germany’s feared encryption system. Three hundred dollars gets you a fully assembled model.
What can you do with your Enigma machine? Well, you can break codes… and make codes… and learn how Arduino works? The makers claim that you can actually get some pretty good encryption out of these things if you and your friends, say, want to communicate by wireless between your undersea lairs. They write:
This gives roughly 532,985,208,200,576 possible settings. Combining these possibilities give us a total of 26,672,901,348,424,004,787,290,112 or about 10 to the 26 power possible starting settings. It’s not AES but…
S&T will build only a few of these puppies so you’d best get cracking. You can obviously build one of these yourself using the instructions provided, but it sure would feel special to pull a machine out of a box that brought so many men to ruin and created the foundations for modern computing.