Disassembling the Amazon Dash(bitsofcents.com) |
Disassembling the Amazon Dash(bitsofcents.com) |
In the jargon of the grocery industry, this means the buttons can be "supplier funded" - Procter & Gamble probably pay Amazon a reasonable portion of the cost of the button, as a marketing method.
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.
You're not the target market. Some people exhibit strong brand loyalty for some stuff. In the UK you'll get people saying that baked beans must be Heinz and no other brand.
I tend to agree with you. I want a button I can push to order the cheapest washing detergent. But that gets complicated. Do I mean actual cheapest price at the till, or do I mean cheapest per wash? Does that mean I want to buy a huge 15 litre tub of industrial detergent?
> that have at least a 4-star rating.
Amazon ratings are already sub-optimal. I could imagine a time when all P&G employees have to buy P&G products from Amazon, and have to give high star ratings, in order to help fix the ratings. Perhaps I'm just overly cynical.
That said, it's almost impossible to imagine that a future where Dash is successful doesn't contain configurable buttons like the ones you describe - they probably just won't be free.
Hadn't thought of that angle at all. Enlightening comment!
Sounds like a win / win for both P&G and Amazon...
I mean, what's the idea, having a button for every single product we buy? And we need to set it up first. How is that any better than recurring ordering or just opening the website and ordering it? Are we expected to have an entire wall of dashes at our place?
I guess we'll need to sort them alphabetically or by color, so we don't waste time searching for the button we need.
Damn... another microphone in your household capable of recording sounds near that device.
is the spark photon really equiv to the dash? or does it still need other components in addition?
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...
http://www.ecinews.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=arti...
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 audio thing does require an app though to do provisioning, which I suppose isn't a problem for the kinds of people ordering this thing.
My preferred provisioning method is to let the little Dash-like device broadcast some setup or config access point. You connect to it, get an HTML UI to input target AP credentials into, and submit the form. It works from just about any device.
This annotation of the Dash components is terrific. It would be fun to probe the exposed pads to see if they have left an STM32 SWIM/JTAG header available. It's interesting that they choose to use a AAA battery but did not include a battery door so that users could replace it. Perhaps that is coming? Still, the power optimization is impressive considering how power hungry it can be to do wi-fi RF transmission (on the order of a 1 watt).
AOL in a big media deal, Clinton running for office, stocks at all time highs, new cuecat is here. What's not to love about 2000?
My background in electronics is quite basic though I'd love to understand how they managed to build an ARM-based, battery-powered device that is predicted to last for years. I know it's not "always on" but it's fascinating nonetheless and I think building something similar would make for a fun project.
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.
main()
while true
Sleep();
InitialiseNetworkStack();
SendPacketToAmazon();Since you rarely press the button , it can live for years.
The whole thing looks like a quick turn of a reference design and the real low-cost design will follow later on.
I like going to the store, socializing, finding things to try, being a human. Pushing a button doesn't do it for me.
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 early press releases mention deeper hardware integration with consumer products. I'm guessing they're going to be dropping this board into other things besides the Dash product.
Were they? From what I recall people were saying, "Why isn't this catalog a webpage yet?"
I'm not sure if buying a bunch of little buttons and plastering them all over my house is necessarily convenient. Convenience is largely counter-intuitive. For example, you'd think everyone would get their groceries delivered at this point, but most of us drive to the grocery store. There's a larger convenience in having all these products at your fingertips, trying different brands, shopping for lower priced items, seeking deals, etc. You lose this flexibility with the Dash. Its also really ugly to have what look like ads plastered all over your home.
I'm surprised we all don't have a home robot with enough computer vision and fuzzy logic to figure out what we're low on and produce a list of items that need to be bought that week. I feel like some kind of robot revolution that was supposed to happen never did, so we're finding weird automation solutions that don't really work. I imagine this is what is was like when computers were rare and you could only use the ones at work because home computers weren't a thing yet. Smith-Corona kept making better and better typewriters but you really just want a word processor and printer.
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.
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.
Maybe the idea won't work but it sounds worth experimenting with to me.
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.
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.
..but the point is that these people can _choose_ to exhibit such loyalty.
This is well-studied and understood. People can stick with a brand for years, until suddenly they change it for another and completely forgot about the other.
The dash seems like just another convenient lockin
Avnet USI is just repackaging the chipset on behalf of ST and Broadcom. Honestly, there are other things you can order today if you don't want to wait for this one. You could try adafruit, sparkfun, or even digikey.
I personally recommend the modules from LS Research.
Module: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/450-0064/450-0064-N...
Eval/Breakout board + Module: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/450-0120/450-0120-N...
Ah, Google's ill-fated attempt to scan all catalogs and put them online
You can certainly choose other brands to put in the machine, but every 40 cycles another box of Tide Pods will show up on your doorstep.
Without analysing the firmware you wouldn't be able to confirm for sure what it's doing.
I suppose one exercise for those inclined would be to reprogram it to listen (perhaps only during the daytime) and see how long it lasts. You wouldn't need high fidelity so a low sample rate would be enough.
It's on your own network, so it's trivial to know when it's communicating and with whom. In principle, it could periodically wake and poll a C&C server to see whether it should start streaming audio or not.
Thankfully most devices I've been working on have a touchscreen to provision the SSID/PW, or we just ask the user to put it in a text file and inject it via a thumb drive. It really doesn't have to be this hard.
I think the audio trick is a pretty elegant hack. Device agnostic and doesn't need a lot of handholding. But it also has an impact on the BOM. You need to add that Cortex M3 + microphone to sniff it out. Otherwise the whole thing could have been run off one chip like the ESP or GainSpan GS2100.
Doing the access point-to-client switcharoo is a good one too but needs a bit more instruction on the customer side, plus a way to whack the device back into setup mode when you need it.
There's not much more to it: the transmitter is already soldered to a small piece of PCB but has the antenna and necessary tuned discretes on there and ready to go. Doesn't add much to the cost: like BillinghamJ says it's the certification time and cost that's not really worth the trouble if you can just amortize it into the cost of the module.
But sure, at this stage it might not be worth it , maybe later.
http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/450-0103C/450-0103C...
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11320
Would it not function as an external wifi antenna?
(and yeah you're right about the ufl. thanks for the correction)
Mileage may vary, of course, but in my experience this type of connector is more frequently used to get conducted power RF measurements in manufacturing settings.
Also, I don't need a wall of buttons, a few inside the bathroom cabinet, a few inside the kitchen cabinet, a few at my workbench, in the garage, in my shed, is all I need.
Even if I find this idea wasteful, I think amazon does the right move with just experimenting.
Writing it off might be premature, at least it is worth a try.
A button that costs somewhere between $5 and $10 might result in something like $240 worth of sales over its lifetime. (eg. 1 sale per month x $10 sale price x estimated 24 month lifetime)
Seems scalable to me.
It depends what you can afford and what each path will save you in the long run.
I think the Amazon Fresh Direct concept mentioned elsewhere by mason55 makes a lot more sense. Stuck to the front of my fridge I want a little scanner--one on my fridge, one by my cabinet, one in my laundry room. Running something across the barcode scanner when it's low/empty is as easy as pressing a button, and doesn't mean I have to put a button on/beside every single item, especially ones that move around my disorganized shelves.
As someone else mentioned though, think of it as "Dash, the physical button" + "Dash, the API". The API is probably the long term goal, the physical button is just a (temporary) drop-dead simple API client that people can use today. Amazon is likely betting on smart-fridges/-pantries/-homes catching up in the future
Edit: in the near-future, I imagine Amazon adding a touchscreen (so it's not product specific) without adding much to BoM. They can also charge manufactures for on-device screen-time (who doesn't like ads that convert to an immediate sale?)
Trying to add a changing ad screen to this would kill the battery life because of the check-ins to fetch the next ad. I also don't see that generating many sales because the customer would still need to change their set order, I think few people would accept Amazon outright changing what the button ordered based on the current ad.
