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Ask HN: Hacking an Echo Dot?

17 points by _bxg1 ↗ HN
My company gave us Amazon Echo Dots for the holidays one year. I don't want Amazon in my home, so it's been sitting in the box.

Does anyone know if it's possible to get Alexa off of it and put custom software on it? Uses I can think of include making it a Bluetooth speaker, putting an open source assistant on it, or any number of other things if I could load custom code.

6 comments

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mises
I'd recommend taking a look at the ifixit teardown here: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Dot+Teardown/613...

They document which chips are inside. This is first gen, but they don't have a second-gen with the same chip description. You probably have second (which is for the better, as it's a mediatek running android and much more usable).

Other things you may find interesting:

* This guy went over intercepting and tinkering with firmware updates. They were HTTP when he did it; that may have changed. If not, they may still be vulnerable to SSL stripping. https://medium.com/@micaksica/exploring-the-amazon-echo-dot-...

* Part 2. Here it is found that it can boot fastboot and be hacked : https://medium.com/@micaksica/exploring-the-amazon-echo-dot-...

* People here rooted an echo; this may or may not work on a dot: https://github.com/echohacking/wiki/wiki

* Forum dedicated to it: https://www.echotalk.org/index.php/board,2.0.html

* Paper on this subject: https://vanderpot.com/Clinton_Cook_Paper.pdf

I suggest googling for more info. If all else fails, I guess just flashing the nand might do it? In summary, v2 is a linux system which means you could likely run anything linux on it (including an open-source assistant), though I suspect it will take no small amount of hacking.

_bxg1
Yeah..... I was hoping the effort level would be more along the lines of flashing a Raspberry PI or Android phone. May not be worth it :P
beenBoutIT
Hacking Amazon devices is IMO far worse than hacking Apple devices, I recommend selling the thing on eBay and buying a Google Home AIY kit or Google Home mini.
emdubs
I'm curious about this too. Amazon mistakenly sent me an echo 2 instead of a dot. They refunded me the cost of the dot, but apparently the echo serial number was reported lost/stolen in their system so it is unusable. They told me to just throw it out, but seems like a waste of perfectly good hardware.
cheeze
You can use an echo as a BT speaker. Just don't connect it to the internet