Amazon’s Dash buttons are $5 Wi-Fi enabled portals of pure consumerism — at least, if you use them how Mr Bezos would like you to. Or, if you’ve got a little programming skill, you can hack them to do almost anything.
https://gizmodo.com/you-can-now-buy-those-stupid-great-amazon-dash-buttons-1720886109
In a post on Medium, Edward Benson details how the Dash buttons work, and how he turned them into a cheap baby data-collection system. The buttons are basically just a Wi-Fi radio and a battery. They lie dormant until you push the button, when it activates, and then connects to your Wi-Fi network.
A device connecting to a network is an event you can easily detect, log, and use. Benson set up his button-pushes to feed into a Google spreadsheet, so he uses it as a one-stop system to track every time his baby poops. (Baby poops -> irate parent pushes button -> new entry is made in the poop-tracking spreadhseet of doom.)
But thanks to platforms like IFTTT, which can use one digital action to complete some other, completely different digital action, it’s easy to think of a bunch of different uses for the buttons — opening a smart door lock, turning on your coffee machine (!!!) or mass-poking all your friends on Facebook. The possibilities are just limited by your imagination and your Python skills.
For the full write-up, including the script Benson uses to log events, head over to the Medium post.
Contact the author at [email protected].
