ST-Geotronics wants to give collectors and cryptographers a chance to re-create a piece of encryption history with a special kit for building an open-source Enigma machine.



 Enigma machines have captivated everyone from legendary code breaker Alan Turing and the dedicated cryptographers from England's Bletchley Park to historians and collectors the world over.



But while many history buffs would surely love to get their hands on an authentic Enigma machine used during WWII, the devices aren't exactly affordable (last year, a 1944 German Enigma machine was available for auction at Bonhams with an estimated worth of up to $82,000). Enter the Open Enigma Project, a kit for building one from scratch.



The idea came to Marc Tessier and James Sanderson from ST-Geotronics by accident.



"We were working on designing and building intelligent Arduino-based open-source geocaching devices to produce a unique interactive challenge at an upcoming Geocaching Mega Event," Tessier told Crave. "A friend of ours suggested we use an Enigma type encrypting/decrypting machine as the ultimate stage of the challenge and pointed us to an Instructables tutorial that used a kid's toy to provide some Enigma encoding. We looked all over to buy a real Enigma machine even if we had to assemble it ourselves and realized that there was nothing available at the moment. So we decided to build our own."

 

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