> because all the prior versions required you to buy an expensive piece of electronics
$4.99 is an 'expensive piece of electronics'?
$4.99 is an 'expensive piece of electronics'?
And putting it on at home is foolish - more work than just reordering detergent myself when it runs out.
It's great because I never remember to do that before its "too late", and its still MY CHOICE to press the button. Nobody wants individual toilet paper packages stuck with their own tracking devices, at least not now.
It's weird that articles like to push that idea, rather than more simple examples people might use.
You are describing the end-user price of a device that includes batteries, a circuit board, a WiFi transciever, a switch, and an enclosure. If the BOM and assembly costs can be brought down to $4.99, that's a miraculous feat of engineering and modern civilization's economies of scale; if it can end up on your doorstop for that price it must be subsidized.
How else could that device cost less than the gallon of industrial chemistry that you order with it?
$2.72 for a single programmable WiFi device, delivered for free. All you need after that is a cheap battery, button, and enclosure. The existence of the ESP8266 is changing the way I think about electronics.
which is subsidized by the USPS and Chinese government using mail reciprocity agreements to ship for pennies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...
This way you will have months or even years in autonomy instead of weeks.
Anyway, here's a teardown I found:
https://mpetroff.net/2015/05/amazon-dash-button-teardown/
Now a surprising thing that I didn't know before - this thing has a microphone on board. Yes. Yet another Internet-connected microphone. Apparently used only to configure the button via ultrasound, but I wonder how hard would be to repurpose it...
The very few people I know with them have 5 or more. That adds up. Especially considering you could just modify one to handle any number of products.