Amazon Dash Button Pwn3d

If you haven’t heard about the Amazon dash button yet we’re glad you quit watching cat videos and have joined us. Just to get you up to speed: the Amazon dash button is a small wireless device that lets your lazy ass order more laundry soap by pushing the “dash button” which should be affixed to something near your washing machine. The pushing of the button will set in motion the gut wrenching process that we used to know as “buying things we ran out of” but thanks to Amazon we can now just cover our entire lives with an assortment of buttons that take zero credentials to physically push. We can’t see that being a problem whatsoever.

Needless to say we as a community set out to find an actual use for these fantastic little devices. [maximus64] has done quite a nice job at enabling this hardware in a most usable way. Most of the hacks we have seen for the dash button remove the physical push button and add a sensor of some kind. Replacing the button with a sensor still uses the WiFi connection to send data from the button to the cloud. Instead of the button ordering more <<product>> from Amazon, a sensor might trigger the dash to increment a counter on your website letting you know that your dog went through the doggy door +1 more times.

[maximus64] has the dash button working in the reverse manner by porting the Broadcom IoT WICED SDK to the button. He is using the dash button as a receiver and when [maximus64] sends the “all good” signal from his laptop to the dash button his garage door opens which you can see in the video after the break. We find this extremely more useful than the dash button’s original intended use. [maximus64] has instructions in the readme.md file of the github repo so that you too can hack your dash button in this way.

We have seen quite a few Amazon dash button hacks, including the one [maximus64] was responding to where we asked you to share your proof of concept to control the WiFi module in the dash button.

25 thoughts on “Amazon Dash Button Pwn3d

  1. This only makes sense to investigate the hardware of the Dash Button. And [maximus64] did quite a good job by doing so. Because to just to open a garage door there are much easier ways (e.g. by using an ESP8266).

    1. Following in the footsteps of the “Not-A-Hack” police, it’s “This Is Only A Hack”Man! Boldly denouncing any project which lacks sufficient engineering chops. Pointing out the pointless in all its forms. Cutting whole cents off any BoM. The fight for truth, justice, and “why bother” rages onward.

    2. You can’t win around here, if you use an esp8266, you will be crucified for “it is not a hack”, if you use repurposed a piece of hardware youget, ” it would have been easier to not hack”.

  2. I’m not sure if he’s heard of this, but they sell this stuff called “grease”, and they make it for garage doors now. You don’t even have to buy it from Amazon. Your local hardware store sells it. “Lithium grease”. Comes in a spray can. There are many internet tubes which can tell you where to stick it. And where not to.

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