Disassembling the Amazon Dash (opens in new tab)

What if the Dash becomes very popular? I believe we'd see an explosion of companies funding dash buttons which would, in my opinion, be a bad thing for the customer. I don't like the idea of locking myself into a brand for the life of the device.

I'd like to see a configurable button that orders, say, the cheapest paper towels that have at least a 4-star rating. The suppliers probably wouldn't be happy about the competition though.

That's a really insightful strategy. Amazon wins by not needing to sink more development time into cheaper hardware by getting P&G to offset costs, while P&G wins by effectively pays a one-time fee per customer per product to ensure a steady stream of sales.

Hadn't thought of that angle at all. Enlightening comment!

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.

I believe it's not intended to be an actual product for very long. Its a stepping stone to get consumers to the point where they are making purchases in situ, via the Amazon Echo for example. It's a behavior grooming thing, a social test balloon.

> Is 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?

In markets with Amazon Fresh they are also trialing a single-device Dash. It operates as a barcode scanner and microphone and adds things to your Dash List on Fresh. Then you can go in and edit them or actually confirm them to your cart.

I have one and it's very, very useful. It hangs from my fridge and whenever I finish something I scan it and when I think of something I need I just speak it into the mic. It made me an instant convert from FreshDiret.

It's the mindless-consumerism aspect of the idea that I find most disturbing: "press this button to feed yourself with product".

I can't speak for Amazon, but I've cancelled every single recurring order I've ever setup.

I once had coffee on recurring order. Then I went on vacation, and I was always one tin ahead. Then I had a business trip, and I was 2 tins ahead, then I was sick for a week and didn't want to eat anything. it was too much.

I once set up a recurring order on wine, at first I drank a bottle every other day. What fun! but then I just wanted a glass with dinner every now and then. Bottles started piling up, and now I have a good $100 of wine that tastes like vinegar.

Recurring orders suck. If you have a huge house to store things if you aren't on a perfect schedule it might work. For normal people, it's not ideal.

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.

I don't see this becoming a single button for ever item in the house. I see the Dash button riding the middle ground between objects that you have highly predictable usage patterns or have a proscribed life span like toothbrushes where recurring orders make sense and less predictable items like paper towels where usage is harder to predict.

I think the goal is also to make using the button easier than just opening the webpage and ordering it so that when you notice you're running low you can just press the button instead of doing what most people do and adding it to a grocery list. It's also far easier than figuring out how often to set up the recurring ordering.

Their aim is at the utility closet and bathroom consumables like soaps/detergents, paper towels, and maybe cleaning products. Things that are stored an some particular place in the house where when you're getting low on X you push the button and get more 2-3 days later.

I especially find the instant delivery order disturbing. Is that even close to necessary in 90% of the use cases? Putting the product in a shopping cart would be more than enough and would allow group shipping.

> I mean, what's the idea, having a button for every single product we buy?

It's a button for every repeatable commodity buy you make. Most applicable use cases are: toilet paper, detergent, cleaning supplies, certain groceries. In other words, it eliminates pretty much all friction to ensuring that you're always stocked with those products. You're right to be skeptical, but even just reducing a small amount of friction to buying means better convenience for the consumer and more money for Amazon.

Or you know, why not a phone application that would order the same thing with a single tap.

It's also about the sense of seeming control, even if the result is a perfect weekly subscription.

doing more listening/processing/data transfer than just the initial setup + occasional button presses would make it drain its single AAA battery quite fast.

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.

Instasoap can't kill each other, tho.

I just want a milkman who comes daily and reads my handwritten note, like we used to have.

The microphone is only active when you hold down the button - if it's always on (for whatever reason, accidentally or maliciously), the unit would run out of power in a few hours, it's powered by a single AAA cell.

> You will see a list of available options from the product line your Dash Button is associated with. For example, if your Dash Button can be used for Tide detergent, you may see a list of various Tide detergent scents and sizes that you can choose from. Tap the item to select it.[0]

That is disappointing, from the early materials it seemed like the face plate was just branding and you could select anything you wanted. They're probably partnering with the various brands that there are buttons for pay some of the cost of manufacturing the devices. There might be a non brand locked version coming in the future once they've moved past the initial release and rollout. At least I hope so.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

Maybe this could help:

http://www.ecinews.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=arti...

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.

The ESP8266 has peak draws of almost a watt when transmitting, unless Amazon releases a crank-to-order device that doesn't seem particularly plausible. I'm slightly surprised that they didn't use the Espresso solution here to keep their part count down, but it is possible this model is just to gauge market interest.

I'm not sure if the 8266 could be powered kinetically - wifi is particularly power hungry.

You are disappointed a wifi device isn't powered by the force of pressing a single button? High standards...

No, and it was pretty clear it wasn't at the time tbh.

Most microcontrollers have extremely low power sleep states, maintaining interrupts on external inputs often only draws the smallest amounts of power. When you're designing for low power electronics like this you often run into the problem of the self discharge of the battery completely dwarfing any consumption your microcontroller has. I'm reasonably confident they chose a lithium AAA simply because they have very low self discharge, and a AAA over something like a coin cell due to the rather enormous amount of power needed to transmit 802.11.

I get the feeling that this device is pretty tentative for Amazon, they haven't gone to huge lengths to keep the price of the build down. In particular there's also a connector on the bottom right of the PCB that looks a lot like it could be for a small screen or some other peripheral.

The main loop looks something like this: Note that the button is hooked up to an interrupt to wake the processor and return from the Sleep() fn.

  main()
    while true
      Sleep();
      InitialiseNetworkStack();
      SendPacketToAmazon();

Basically it always sleeps, and wakes only when you press the button - does it job rapidly and goes back to sleep.

Since you rarely press the button , it can live for years.

The setup process involves some audio processing which requires slightly more than trivial signal processing and also some RAM usage... Also handling the network stack requires some RAM. The combination of those two requirements and the low cost of the STM32s of that level of capability mean it was probably a sensible choice.

First batch might be a MVP.

Cost of carrier access.

I think the first gen. kindle put them off of that.

To me, the choice to use off the shelf hardware reflects Amazon's dedication to lean values. In this sense, they're doing the absolute minimum (using off-the-shelf hardware instead of spending 2 years spinning their own SoC) to verify that their product (on-demand household commodity ordering) is actually something people want. Makes a lot more sense in terms of turnaround time and money - if the idea proves valuable, they can start expending the effort to reduce costs through SoC development.

As the top commenter pointed out, though, I don't think they would really need to spend the time recouping those margins - since all the brands signed up for this service are big-name brands owned by Proctor and Gamble, it could indicate a relationship wherein P&G helps them absorb some of the costs of the hardware in exchange for what is effectively marketing.

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.