
Ask HN: Hacking an Echo Dot? - _bxg1
My company gave us Amazon Echo Dots for the holidays one year. I don&#x27;t want Amazon in my home, so it&#x27;s been sitting in the box.<p>Does anyone know if it&#x27;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.
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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...](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Dot+Teardown/61304)

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-...](https://medium.com/@micaksica/exploring-the-amazon-echo-dot-part-1-intercepting-firmware-updates-c7e0f9408b59)

* Part 2. Here it is found that it can boot fastboot and be hacked : [https://medium.com/@micaksica/exploring-the-amazon-echo-dot-...](https://medium.com/@micaksica/exploring-the-amazon-echo-dot-part-2-into-mediatek-utility-hell-b452f62e5e87)

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

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

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

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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.

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scjosh
[https://github.com/echohacking/wiki/wiki/Echo-
Dot-v2](https://github.com/echohacking/wiki/wiki/Echo-Dot-v2) has some links
to resources regarding custom firmware and some great write-ups explaining the
OTA updates.

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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.

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cheeze
You can use an echo as a BT speaker. Just don't connect it to the internet

