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Official Amazon Power Adaptor for Echo Dot and Echo Show 5 | 15 W, Chalk, for Echo Dot (3rd/4th generation), Echo Show 5, Echo Spot and Fire TV Cube

£9.9£99Clearance
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Even if you’re not interested in restoring its USB port, [Brian] has uncovered a wealth of fascinating hardware information about the Echo Dot during his deep-dive. For example, he found that driving one of the pins high would trigger the Dot to mute its microphones; which could be useful for anyone looking to cover Alexa’s ears.

Power Cable for Echo Dot (3rd Gen Replacement Compatible Echo Power Cable for Echo Dot (3rd Gen

She’s in her mid-90s and partially sighted, plus the obvious mobility/dexterity issues of old age; so its a pretty ideal solution.

Got to agree it seems pretty unlikely – i’ve built a few audio projects over the years, and generally found that microphonics only occur with med-high capacitance ceramic types (when tantalum caps are often a better fit). Even better, it turns out the USB data lines are connected to the test points located on the bottom of the Dot. Maybe other physical phenomenas too like miniscule oscillations in CPU’s voltage regulator – this can be sensed and decoded although voice quality is abysmal. My experience with kindle tablets, ps4 controllers and numerous other devices is that the Micro B jacks are way more fragile than their mini and standard sized brethren.

21W Power Charger Adapter 15V 1.4A Replacement with Alexa

If you really want a “cover your ears” feature I would suggest doing something more direct than setting some pin high. does the device support 20v or is it going to fry when it’s circuitry that expects 5v encounters 20v? I’m more interested in hacks that uses Alexa, it’s almost impossible to make it use a homemade device unless you also provide a server or cloud-based connection.

If anything having Alexa glowing in the corner is just a reminder of that and it may serve to stop you from saying something you shouldn’t in range of one of the other 10 microphones you have in your house. I also read that they were considering making the device’s speech processing more powerful, so that it could process a lot of the simpler commands itself instead of sending the audio to the cloud for processing, so things like asking it to turn lights on and off or the weather etc… didn’t require cloud processing. I did a teardown on a broken 2nd gen Echo dot a while back out of curiosity, and I don’t remember really see anything in the echo that would warranty high value caps to lead to this – It had an array of 6 surface mounted mics spaced equidistantly around its periphery (each of which has holes through the device) so doubt it needs much else for doing its direction sensing, etc along with voice detection.

Uncovering The Echo Dot’s Hidden USB Port | Hackaday Uncovering The Echo Dot’s Hidden USB Port | Hackaday

All you need is a simple breakout that will connect through the existing opening in the device’s case, and you’ve got your USB port back. Brian] found that the Dot shows up as a Mediatek device under Linux using lsusb, and fastboot can see it and even confirms the presence of a locked bootloader. and of course the way young adults “unplug” their phones by jerking at the cable or bending the connector. Spend 5 minutes looking at the connector and if you cannot figure out how it is kept attached and how that mechanism can wear or be distorted ask someone who can. That won’t work because it’s likely that they’re also using “microphonics” effect of ceramic capacitors.While they removed the external USB connector, the traces for it are still on the board waiting to be accessed.

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