Amazon launched Dash buttons earlier this year in order to allow Amazon Prime customers to order products by simply pressing them. The small WiFi enabled buttons only cost $5, and looked like a nice thing to hack. And that’s exactly what Ted Benson did, and managed to use them to log his baby’s patterns like the number of time he poos, or wakes up at night by pressing some buttons, and storing the results in a spreadsheet.
The hack does not involve any firmware or hardware modifications, and instead he noticed that the Dash was disconnected and sleeping, except when the button was pressed. So all he does is to detect ARP requests from the Dash using some Python code relying on Scapy library, and when the MAC address matches one of the dash MAC addresses (hard coded in the Python program), data is sent to a Google Spreadsheet using a tools called Magic-Form. Here’s a quick demo.
Just one last detail… You’ll have to make sure you don’t complete the last step of the setup instructions from by Amazon, that is setting the product to order, unless you plan on ordering the product each time your press the button to record your baby’s cries, or other activity.
Via Hackernews and Liliputing
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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arp-scan has been my friend for a long time on my home LAN, for example to detect if a phone is online, or a PS3 station. I’ve fed that into MRTG, and, voila, I had an overview when the phone owner was at home.