Amazon Echo Look

Fashion conscious and (irrevocably vain or hopelessly insecure).

I'm 95% confident that I have no use for it and expect complete failure, therefore it will sell and cement Amazon as the #1 player in machine learning.

I was going to spend a little while spitballing about how it shouldn't be all that hard to build a wall-hangable replica without all the creepy cloud-bound spy smarts - and then I found this [1], which does a better job than I could. I'd probably clean up the sides and use something nicer than veroboard for the grille, if I were making this myself, but it's a very good first approximation to say the least.

And Adafruit's method solves the major problem, of where to find a suitable lens to replace the rather expensive [2] original prop part, very handily! Unfortunately, they're out of stock of the rather crucial button, but Sparkfun appears [3] to have no trouble sourcing them.

ETA: On further reading, I wouldn't follow this Adafruit method; I don't have access to a laser cutter, and even if I did, having the tabs stick out the side, and the whole thing sort of jigsawed together that way, doesn't appeal.

Instead, I'd work up a frame from aluminum bar stock, which isn't all that much harder to work with than plastic, and build the faceplate to mount picture-frame-style in a groove milled into the inside face of the bar. If you've got access to a laser cutter, you probably also have, or can easily enough get access to, a milling machine, whether CNC or manual - they even make mini-XY tables with Dremel mounts, which might actually be preferable for a small job like this to something more like a Bridgeport machine. (If you do want some smarts in there, you can have as much room for them as you need - just pick a suitably sized bar stock. The groove will be near the front edge in any case, since the prop doesn't have a lot of depth there; the rest is just trading off between how much space you have behind the faceplate, and how proud of the wall you want the finished item to be.)

Also, since I (again) don't have access to a laser cutter, I'd cut down the grille from the door RF shield out of a scrap-heap microwave. If you don't have one of those lying around - and why would you? - your local junkyard does, and who doesn't love a trip to the junkyard? Shouldn't cost more than a few bucks; if you bring your dikes and don't mind maybe having to stitch up a hole in a pocket, you can probably cut the piece you need and smuggle it out without paying a cent, although you probably want to be paying for something else at the same time so it doesn't look too sketchy.

Looks like a fun project, in any case, laser cutter or no!

[1] https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/hal-9000-replic...

[2] http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/8mm-f8.htm

[3] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9181

Of course the obvious thing we all did was freak out about privacy, etc. They'll soon be pulling video from the crime scene.

Anyway, can some of the HN crowd take the sunny day case (assume we'll properly address privacy), and discuss interesting uses of this technology? Image recognition and shopping? Show it want you want to buy, for example.

I for one am looking forward to Fapening 3.0