Here is where you can recycle dash buttons https://amazonrecycling-us.re-teck.com/recycling/home
Plus, I bet your teeth have never been brighter.
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Minty fresh. At least that’s what my dog says.
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NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO oh wait, I don’t care
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I guess his hopes were…Dashed.
YEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHH!
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This reminds me of one of the funniest bits from the CoolGamesInc podcast:
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I bought an Amazon Basics microwave. I could set it up through the Amazon app to order more of a specific brand of microwave popcorn once I ran out. I was supposed to tell it how many bags I had in my cabinet, then when the popcorn button was used enough times to get my supply down to two bags, it would order another box of the brand I had chosen.
Unfortunately, I have kids, and I realized quickly that they could turn on the microwave using their voice. The thought that someone could accidentally start a fire by unintentionally running the microwave with nothing in it caused me to immediately pack the thing back up and ship it back to them.
Would it have been useful? Meh. I can always grab a box of microwave popcorn when grocery shopping.
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It was a bad idea whose time had come.
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A printer that orders ink… Yay! What could possibly go wrong?
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In the newest Roseanne there was an episode dealing with racism and Islamophobia. The setup was that new Muslim neighbors moved in across the street and Roseanne thought they were terrorists because they had so many bags of fertilizer in front of their garage. The punchline was that they had an Amazon Dash button that the husband kept pressing without knowing what it was for. It was a problematic episode in a few ways, but I thought that was pretty damn funny.
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It was in the latest Amazon brain implant update.
For example, to (re)order Tide, if you look up, look left, and say “Tide”
(Probably unrelated: Tide is now very popular among college-age consumers in Alabama.)
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That’s fantastic. I had a coworker a bunch of years back that set up one of the Staples “that was easy!” buttons to compile the nightly build for some company development tools. It was more fun than a cron job.
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I can imagine kids finding a button for something they like a lot and just hammering the thing while planning to intercept the deliveries.
Security and easy of use are opposing forces.
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Let the hacking of Dash Buttons begin!
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I used one of these unmodified to order Larabars, until Amazon and their shitty warehouse sent me several boxes of spoiled windex-spelling bars and some of the bait-and-switch pricing kicked in.
Seriously, this shit may be the future, but it you can’t keep my food fresh, Amazon isn’t going to be the one running it.
I don’t have one, but I imagine it works exactly like the dash button; that is, you tie it to your account and tell it which product to reorder, and it just tells amazon “Buy the thing tied to device id zbasdf1234 on account 3245knlmnkjsdf”. You can always go on the app and change the order. Doubtful it would brick the device, it would just have a non functional button, like all those “smart” tvs that never updated and no longer work with some services.
made a doorbell out of one of them
Has it been reliable over time? I tried using one to turn on the heater in my camper, which worked maybe 70% of the time… The hack to get them to work, at least when I was fiddling with them a couple of years ago, was so hackey (detecting when the device joined the wifi network), it just didn’t seem reliable enough for anything that absolutely had to work like a doorbell. I’d be curious what your experience is though, since I’ve still got like 5 of them, which have suddenly been elevated to interesting old tech.
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it’s been pretty reliable. the trigger i’m using is not that it has joined the wifi network, but that it has ARPed for something. in fact it’s less than that, the script just looks for a packet from the right mac address, no matter what it is (but i’m pretty sure the first thing it does is an ARP)
the line in question is:
tcpdump -c 1 ether src host [macaddr] >& /dev/null
which blocks until a single packet with the mac address of the dash button is seen. the following script just then goes off and sends a push notification (via Pushover) and starts a video feed for 30 seconds on the computer running the script.)
the nice thing is that this can run on any computer… and in fact, i have another computer running homebridge with the videodoorbell plugin which basically does the same thing. over there i have another plugin for dash buttons which starts the process, which i believe also looks for an L2 packet from the button. so now i’m firmly in belt and suspenders territory - i get notifications from Pushover, and also homekit notifications when someone pushes the button.
i guess one problem is there’s no feedback for the user - the button does not make any noise and the only indication something happened is that the LED flashes. but so far no one has mashed the hell out of the button.
i just realized that since they have discontinued these, that there may be no way to configure one in the future if they remove the configuration stuff from the amazon app. it might be time to buy one of their IoT buttons as a backup.
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Awesome, guess I’ll try it again.
As I remember I wasn’t getting 100% reliability with the ARP packet method, so I set the doorbell to a static IP on my DHCP server, and my script would just ping that IP. That worked better (if I remember right) but still wasn’t completely reliable for me. Who knows, maybe it was just some issue with my network.
And oof, good point about them removing the ability to configure them through their web interface!
It would be awesome if there was a true, full root style hack for these buttons. Such amazing hardware, if we could get full control of them they’d be downright powerful.
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