AMAZON Dash

 

Well, I just received a couple of these nifty devices from Amazon.

Being in Canada, it's basically useless right now but I have a lot of ideas on what we can do with these medicine tablet size devices.

The Dash has a basic ARM processor and WIFI connectivity, and once you set it up on your mobile device thru the Amazon app, depending on what product you set it up to buy from Amazon, every time you push the button it will connect to your WIFI router, submit the command thru Amazon (log a purchase) and then turns itself off to save power.

 

Now, if you didn't set up a product for purchase in your Amazon App, it will basically just connect to your WIFI router, and then disconnect.

 

With this behavior, we can create a monitoring app (ARP Probe), which just detects if Amazon Dash  connects to the WIFI router, and then based on this, trigger an action.

 

Here are some of possible applications the Dash can be used for with IFTTT:

 

1. Doorbell  - Push the button, trigger a notification on all the iPads, android machines

2. Door Opener - Push a button, opens a zwave door lock

3. Picture taker - Push a button, grabs a snapshot from my webcam running on the dockstar and email it

4. Light switch - Push button, turn on a zwave light (no need to grab phone, open app, turn on)

5. Garage door opener - Open the garage from living room (might be a security risk)

6. Data logger - Push a button everytime you drink medicine, post it to a spreadsheet so you'll track it.

7. Self Destruct - For the paranoid people out there, a self destruct switch, which turns on wemo/zwave switch that turns on an electromagnet besides your hard drive.

8. etc.

 

The common denominator would be is that you'd need an always on machine, like a Raspberry Pi, Dockstar, Openwrt router, Smartthings, file server PC, etc.  that is running Linux or Windows and when the button is pressed, a monitoring program will detect the MAC address of the Dash, depending on what triggers you have setup in IFTTT (example: file created in Dropbox, send an email to IFTTT, etc.) and when IFTTT detects that, it will then generate a subsequent action like turn on the light (via Wemo, Smarthings, Hue), Post a facebook/instagram/twitter message, and lots of other actions.

 

Stay tune for number 3, I'm planning on having the Amazon Dash post a screen cap from my dockstar's mjpg-streamer automatically to either my FB acct or instagram whenever I push the button.