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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

This looks a little too elaborate for an April 1st joke, but they can't possibly serious?

I mean, who will scatter these "buttons" all over their house, which will inevitably need new batteries at ever shorter and diverging intervals...

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Stick a nice Duracell button beneath every one of them.

Use Dash to order new batteries when they run out. Simple.

Seriously, if a button can order new coffee, it can let Amazon know that it's running low automatically.

I'd bet you'd just get a whole new button in the mail when the battery is close to dying.

But what if your battery-dash button runs out of batteries?

Have it send an order automatically.

Use Dash to order a new Dash!

Actually, pushing the button might be the trick of generating enough energy to open a wifi connection and send a HTTP GET to an Amazon server.

It really only needs to be on for a few seconds after pressing the button to connect to wifi, and submit the order. No need for it to be in sleep mode.

I doubt the battery is even replaceable.

I'm guessing it's bluetooth low energy, which I believe you can run off of a small battery for around a year.

Even if it's Wifi, an ESP8266 only uses 78µA in deep sleep mode, which is how these buttons will spend 99.99% of the time, so it could last more an year on a single AA battery.

It doesn't need to be on all the time. It can just take however long it wants to start up, connect, and transmit the order.

i think many people are missing this key point. this isn't a "i need this right this very millisecond" its more of a "i need this later today if its early enough or tomorrow would be fine" button. which a single press of a button would wake up the device, connect to what ever configured network connection it is assigned to, send some data to an API end point, go back to sleep. that could make the button last many years.

"only" 78 microamps is a LOT of current for ultra low power applications like this.

On top of that, ~~the ESP8266 doesn't seem to implement wifi, it's just 2.4ghz general purpose radio.~~

There is definitely some cleverness happening here that allows them to get this to where it is. I'd love to get one just to tear it down.

No, the ESP8266 does implement Wifi. And not only that, as it can also run custom code, so it could be the only IC in the package.

Oh wow! I didn't realize that! Awesome!

I thought so too, but they have a real sounding TOS and quotes from executives at the various partner companies that check out. Seems like a really involved joke from a company that is quite serious about a lot of ridiculous sounding things (drone delivery for one).

The button can automatically order batteries for you when it's running low.

Presumably these buttons would be free anyways, since they generate tons of revenue if they do what Amazon thinks they'll do.

In the end though, the buttons are really just an advertisement for the real product: the API.

I can see it being a very clever PR April Fools stunt. I wouldn't launch a real product like this around April 1st. However, launching a plausible but fake one will grab a lot of attention, genius.

Gmail launched on April 1st 10 years ago ... people also thought it was a joke due to the huge 1GB storage.

I think the battery situation could be fine. I have a wireless mouse that boasts 3 year battery life. Since a 'dash' would only ever need to switch on and send a quick signal when pushed (which for detergent might be 50 times a year?) I imagine it could live for years (say a few hundred pushes) on a single cell.

More like 2-3 times per year. You push the button when you run low, not every time you do a load.

I know a gent working on e-ink tags for grocery store shelves. They have a similar energy usage, lots of sitting idle punctuated by doing something. He's gotten 5 years on a single coin cell. I can't imagine that this would be much different.

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