Similarly, i bought both her and my grandpa kindles the best part of a decade ago when their eyesight began to get steadily worse. does the device support 20v or is it going to fry when it’s circuitry that expects 5v encounters 20v? I haven’t run across many discarded usb cables that couldn’t have their fault corrected inside of five minutes.

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its not only the springly thing, but also the horrible flimsy way the cable is attached to the male micro-usb connector in most cables. 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. 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.

While they removed the external USB connector, the traces for it are still on the board waiting to be accessed. 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). Once had a handheld 2M radio, and a packet TNC, with identical barrel jacks, except that one was *negative* centre pin. If you really want a “cover your ears” feature I would suggest doing something more direct than setting some pin high.

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

She’s in her mid-90s and partially sighted, plus the obvious mobility/dexterity issues of old age; so its a pretty ideal solution.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. Earlier models of the Dot used a garden variety micro USB port for power, which hackers eventually figured out also provided a helpful way to snoop around inside the device’s firmware. They have a quite nice mic setup on board but even listening for the “wake up” word, they need to be, and are, completely awake and transmitting. Maybe other physical phenomenas too like miniscule oscillations in CPU’s voltage regulator – this can be sensed and decoded although voice quality is abysmal. Recently Philips Hue bulbs got a new version with bluetooth and it can be controlled directly by Alexa through the Echo Dot.

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People are lazy and would often rather spend unneeded money on parts that have simply suffered the effects of our handling or mishandling. 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.

With Micro-B, the springs were moved to the far less expensive and far more easily replacable cable. 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.

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During the 20 years I’ve used USB I’ve seen exactly one bad USB cable, and even that was dead on arrival, not worn out. He’s mapped out many of the test points located throughout the device’s PCBs, and found a few interesting points that might be worth further investigation. That won’t work because it’s likely that they’re also using “microphonics” effect of ceramic capacitors. 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.Even better, it turns out the USB data lines are connected to the test points located on the bottom of the Dot.