We wanted flying cars, but instead we got one-button branded soap ordering.
Disassembling the Amazon Dash
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: Disassembling the Amazon Dash
#32Is it just me that finds the entire concept of the Dash ridiculous? I mean, what's the idea, having a button for every single product we buy? And we need to set it up first. How is that any better than recurring ordering or just opening the website and ordering it? Are we expected to have an entire wall of dashes at our place? I guess we'll need to sort them alphabetically or by color, so we don't waste time searchin…
I don't think the concept is so ridiculous: it's easier to press a single button that is placed in the area where you'd normally notice the product you're looking for is running out compared to getting out an mobile app or visiting a website. Ease of use is likely to lead to more sales.
Maybe the idea won't work but it sounds worth experimenting with to me.
Re: Disassembling the Amazon Dash
#33I'm disappointed that it isn't powered by the kinetic energy of the pressing: I heard some Philips Zigbee control devices work that way (but Wifi might be too power hungry for that). And I was expecting them to use the ESP8266 for this: Does anybody know if (at scale) that would have been cheaper?
You are disappointed a wifi device isn't powered by the force of pressing a single button? High standards...
Re: Disassembling the Amazon Dash
#34All of those exposed pads on the pcb, as well as the silkscreening near a quartet of pads labeled TX1 make me think this thing is going to be amazingly hackable. The micro in there is no slouch by any means, and a wifi module is always fun. I'm giving it at most a week before interesting things are done with these.
Re: Disassembling the Amazon Dash
#35I'm disappointed that it isn't powered by the kinetic energy of the pressing: I heard some Philips Zigbee control devices work that way (but Wifi might be too power hungry for that). And I was expecting them to use the ESP8266 for this: Does anybody know if (at scale) that would have been cheaper?
It doesn't look like the ESP8266 has the necessary I/O to do the audio provisioning trick that the Dash is doing with that hybrid module.
Provisioning these things can be a hassle sometimes. The TI CC3xxx has a really wacky one. A custom provisioning app transmits the SSID and password of the target network by sending encrypted packets to nobody: the CC3xxx sniffs the length of the encypted packets and picks up the necessary information from the string of those length bytes.
The audio thing is a lot more elegant, but needs some filtering and processing to make it happen.
Re: Disassembling the Amazon Dash
#36Is it just me that finds the entire concept of the Dash ridiculous? I mean, what's the idea, having a button for every single product we buy? And we need to set it up first. How is that any better than recurring ordering or just opening the website and ordering it? Are we expected to have an entire wall of dashes at our place? I guess we'll need to sort them alphabetically or by color, so we don't waste time searchin…
It's also about the sense of seeming control, even if the result is a perfect weekly subscription.
Re: Disassembling the Amazon Dash
#37"Also on the bottom is the small microphone used for setting up the Dash."
Damn... another microphone in your household capable of recording sounds near that device.
Re: Disassembling the Amazon Dash
#38All of those exposed pads on the pcb, as well as the silkscreening near a quartet of pads labeled TX1 make me think this thing is going to be amazingly hackable. The micro in there is no slouch by any means, and a wifi module is always fun. I'm giving it at most a week before interesting things are done with these.
Or one could just (pre)order the $19 Spark Photon and get a working module with code, schematics, and support. Depends how you value your time.
Re: Disassembling the Amazon Dash
#39Is it just me that finds the entire concept of the Dash ridiculous? I mean, what's the idea, having a button for every single product we buy? And we need to set it up first. How is that any better than recurring ordering or just opening the website and ordering it? Are we expected to have an entire wall of dashes at our place? I guess we'll need to sort them alphabetically or by color, so we don't waste time searchin…
Sure, but just a few decades ago there were people dismissing all of e-commerce saying "why would I order online when I can just pick up the phone and call in my order?" I'm sure before that there were people saying, Why do I need phone ordering when I can just mail an order form to Sears? I think it's a mistake to bet against a more convenient form of consumerism.
Re: Disassembling the Amazon Dash
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is estimating the price of one of these things as being $5 - I imagine that at least for an initial trial Amazon have decided they can make a decent return on them at that cost without certifying their own components.
Also a key factor may have been the time required to get their own stuff certified vs using off the shelf stuff.
A lot of people prototyping in the IoT space are using the precertified modules.
There's not much more to it: the transmitter is already soldered to a small piece of PCB but has the antenna and necessary tuned discretes on there and ready to go. Doesn't add much to the cost: like BillinghamJ says it's the certification time and cost that's not really worth the trouble if you can just amortize it into the cost of the module.