Last Friday, November 18, the lab work carried out in SD (Digital Systems) consisted of the “construction” of a variant of the enigma machine. This machine was used by the German military forces during World War II to encode and decode messages.

The machine generated ramdom messages (in binary) that passed through an encoder and later through a decoder in order to return to the initial message. This was all described in VHDL in the Vivado program and later tested on the Basys 3 prototyping board. The board, using LEDs and a 7 segment display, showed the initial, the coded and the decoded messages, just like in the video below.

So far this was the lab I liked the most because it was about something that has had a practical use and played an important role in history. Classes like these make me more and more motivated and interested in the course.