There was a buzz created in the 1990s when the series of "Magic Eye" books were first published. These books displayed 3D images on plain paper without the need of any special head gear like red-green, Polaroid or LCD shutter glasses. These 3D images could be seen with the naked eye. The secret was the use of a horizontal repeating series of dots with a slight variation in the repeating series to give the illusion of depth in the 2D image. These images have been called a few names, including autostereograms, single image random dot stereograms (SIRDS), and single image stereograms (SIS). We will call them autostereograms in this learning guide.

With the Tiny Autostereogram Construction Kit (or TACK for short), you can create your own autostereograms using CircuitPython and an Adafruit Metro M4 Express and an Adafruit ePaper shield. It creates these 3D images from black and white or grayscale BMP images and display them on an Adafruit ePaper shield. You can even save them to a file and post them on social media. They are small enough be displayed on a smart phone and still retain the 3D effect. This project will require you to create and copy files onto the Metro M4 Express device. You will also need the help of a paint program that can resize images and save them to either 2 color or grayscale BMP files. 

Parts

Building this project requires no soldering and uses just two parts: the Adafruit Metro M4 Express and the Adafruit 2.7" Tri-Color eInk / ePaper Shield with SRAM.  Either the Metro M4 or Metro M4 Airlift Express can be used.

If you are interested in ePaper displays for other projects, check out the entire line of Adafruit's ePaper displays.

If you like this no solder project, you may also like the ePaper Maze Maker, the eInk / ePaper Weather Station, and the ePaper Calendar projects, which use the same components as this project: the ePaper shield and either the Metro M4 Express or Metro M4 Express Airlift light board. Since this project does not require a WiFi connection either Metro M4 Express board will work.

Parts