Hacking Amazon Echo Through Its Remote

This one’s crazy… literally one electronic device is talking to another. In spoken English. And it works.

We’ve covered several hacks for the Amazon Echo, but some might be surprised to learn that there is another piece of interesting hardware that comes along with it – a remote control. Wire in a Raspberry Pi to it, and you’ve given yourself a way to automate control of the Echo without ever taking the Echo itself apart. [Gamaral] did just this and gave his Echo some significantly enhanced capabilities.

He started off by identifying the power rails of the remote. Then he wires in a 3.3v voltage regulator and uses a 100 ohm resistor as a voltage divider to bring it down to the 1.8 volt logic level used by the Echo remote. A single wire runs from the Raspi GPIO to one of the tactile switches on the controller.

For software, the Raspi is running RPi buildroot with Espeak and a cron scheduler compiled in. This allows him to send commands to the Echo which makes it say just about anything he wants. But any voice commands accepted by the Echo should work. If you want to go outside of those boundaries check out the method of spoofing WeMo devices we saw the other day.

Be sure to check out the [gamaral’s] entertaining video below to see the hack in action.

Filed under: Raspberry Pi