The Amazon Dash Button: A Retrospective

The Internet of Things will revolutionize everything! Manufacturing? Dog walking? Coffee bean refilling? Car driving? Food eating? Put a sensor in it! The marketing makes it pretty clear that there’s no part of our lives which isn’t enhanced with The Internet of Things. Why? Because with a simple sensor and …read more

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Orphaned Amazon Dash Buttons Ripe For Hacking

Amazon Dash buttons were the ultimate single purpose networked device; it really can’t get much simpler than a push button that sends a single message to a fixed endpoint. It was an experiment in ultimate convenience, an entry point to a connected home, and a target for critics of consumerism …read more

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Making a Dash Button Update Your To-do List

Amazon’s Dash Buttons are useful little devices, that let you automatically order a wide variety of common household goods at the press of a button. They’re cheap and wireless and readily available, and that makes them ripe for hacking. In just this vein, [Inbar] and [Ezra] found a way to …read more

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Amazon Dash Button Finds Your Phone

This scene replays quite often in our house: my wife has misplaced her cell phone so she asks me to call her. But where did I leave my cell phone? And the race is on! Who will find their phone first to call the other?

[Zapta] solves this problem with his Phone Finder. The system comes in two parts: a base station with WiFi that’s also connected to the house’s phone line, and an arbitrary number of Amazon Dash buttons that trigger dialing commands.

[Zapta] presses a Dash button, which connects over WiFi to the base station. The base station …read more

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Bending The New Amazon Dash Button To Your Will

Most Hackaday readers are familiar with the Amazon Dash button even if it has not yet made an appearance in their country or region. A WiFi enabled button emblazoned with a product logo, that triggers an Amazon order for that product when you press it. Stick it on your washing machine, press the button when you run out of laundry soap, and as if by magic some laundry soap appears. You still have to get out of your armchair to collect the soap from the delivery guy, but maybe they’re working on that problem too.

Of course the embedded computer …read more

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