How I made my own Amazon Dash button | Hacker News Reader

How I made my own Amazon Dash button

stavros.io

47 pointsstelabouras11 comments

Wonder when Amazon will just make this easier for everyone. They already have if it just moves out of beta: https://aws.amazon.com/iot/button/

Here's another person who had a very cool implementation with the actual Amazon Dash button. They messed with it (software only) to track baby data!

You could use the same method to track many other things if you got creative.

https://medium.com/@edwardbenson/how-i-hacked-amazon-s-5-wif...

That's another cool solution, but it's more hackish (since you're doing it at the network level). Too bad the Dash button isn't more hackable, it's a very nice device.

The lithium battery in it is super expensive too, I would be surprised if it cost less than $5 to make.

Cool project, and in case you've never heard of Amazon Dash (as I hadn't)...

Amazon Dash is a button that when pressed will place an order on Amazon via Wi-Fi, controllable by the Amazon App:

https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=10667898011

Technically, Dash is a different product from Dash Button. The Dash is a barcode scanner/voice device for Amazon's grocery business (Amazon Fresh). You say a product's name or scan its barcode and it adds it to your cart on Amazon Fresh.

https://fresh.amazon.com/dash/

Someone made a programmable button and it looks extremely nice but its very pricy: https://flic.io/ Tempted to order some and have a play.

My problems with the flic is that it's pricy, I don't know how open it is, and I don't know whether it requires a bluetooth connection with a nearby phone.

Interestingly, the Dash uses wi-fi controlled by the setup app to be configured with an Android phone, but because the app can't control the wi-fi on an iPhone it uses ultrasonic signals: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

You may need to increase your iPhone volume, since Dash Button uses ultrasonic tones to sync with your iPhone during setup.

That's how the Furby Boom is able to interact with the iPad app ... only problem is, I can still hear the damn noises despite being 35!

Shameless plug: I wrote a quick and dirty node.js library to re-purpose the amazon branded ones to do anything you want.

https://github.com/hortinstein/node-dash-button

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