Best Alexa smart speaker for the price with great sound & bass - Amazon Echo 3rd Gen (2019) Review
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Amazon Echo 3rd Gen (2019) Review – Amazon Echo speakers are not new. In fact, this one is the third iteration of Amazon’s smart speakers and it comes with significant upgraded audio quality. With a 3-inch woofer and increased back volume, the bass now feels stronger without having to grab that extra Echo Sub, plus […]

A friend was dumping stuff prior to a move. I took all his electro gadgets just to prevent it becoming e-waste.

In the pile of stuff is an Amazon Alexa. Fuck #Amazon. I boycott Amazon and also have principled objections to their snooping, business practices, etc. My choices seem to be:

  • trash the Alexa
  • donate the Alexa to charity

These are both lousy choices. Donating it as-is would ultimately put it in someone’s house which then feeds Amazon.

Is there another option? I did a quick search and see no FOSS to replace whatever garbage Amazon has on it. It could be attached to the LAN with an egress firewall that blocks cloud access, but I suppose then it is useless, correct?

(update) I added a link to an article that shows what the thing looks like. The article is otherwise irrelevent.

New extra requirement: the user must be able to say “Oh, yeah, no, for sure” without the thing exploding into flames.

(update 2)

There is no product ID info on the device itself. I had to go through a lot of analysis just to find out what the fuck the thing is. Apparently it is an Echo gen 2. So then I looked for a manual. Found this:

https://www.amazon.com/Echo-2nd-Generation-Manual-Guide-ebook/dp/B0793JNBYR/

No PDF manual! WTF. Amazon expects us to subscribe to some Kindle bullshit just to get the manual, or /pay/ the cost of a big mac to get a paper manual. Motherfuckers.

I don’t need it that bad.

(update 3)

related threads:

Although a lot of chatter is about the echo DOT, which is something else.

  • JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net
    7·
    3 days ago

    You could replace the microcontroller with an ESP32S3 and use the speaker and microphone with Home Assistant/Music Assistant or Willow voice assistant to essentially replace a lot of the real-use functionality: lights, music, and timers that Amazon said itself was almost all of its use according to their data harvesting 😂.

    It depends how DIY/electronics savvy you are or if you are looking for a project.

  • lemmysmash@beehaw.org
    28·
    3 days ago

    If it has good speaker in it, in the worst case you can just cut/throw away all the “smart” electronics out of it and place something like a RPi + an amplifier inside to have a mini media center.

    • plateee@piefed.socialEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      I’ve done something similar - repurposing old 90’s boomboxes with hifiberry - it works relatively well (but does require some tinkering.

      • lemmysmash@beehaw.org
        4·
        3 days ago

        Depends on which setup you’d like to go for.

        Disassembly aside (no idea how Alexa looks like on the inside), you could go for something simplest: take a RPi 1B/2/3/4, plug in the 3.5mm jack into it and solder the other side directly to the speaker. This, in theory, should work out of the box and give you some decent sound (and probably even okayish volume).

        If you want to go more elaborate, you might use some smaller/cheaper computer (e.g. RPi Zero 2W) + some tiny external DAC+amplifier. In this case you will have to ensure that the DAC is compatible with your computer, that the software is there and also handle power supply to both of them, and possibly also take care of the 50/60 Hz hum induced by it (depends on the power supply, the DAC and its wiring).

        • lemmysmash@beehaw.org
          3·
          3 days ago

          You could go even cheaper with something like this: https://arduinoyard.com/dfplayer-mini-with-esp32/

          But here you start hitting a limitation that it won’t be a regular Linux machine anymore, but a microcontroller with its own set of capabilities and interfaces that you’d need to handle.

          For example, in this configuration it would be able to play MP3 files from an SD card, but probably not the web streams (even direct ones) or something of that nature — for that you’d need a different setup, I guess.

  • Trex202@lemmy.world
    12·
    4 days ago

    Repurpose the battery? Short of scraping it for parts, I’m not sure Amazon designed it to be anything other than their spying tool

  • HairyHarry@lemmy.world
    6·
    3 days ago

    Not sure if you want to do that, but:

    Exchange leds, mics and board and build your own localized or cloud based (for example homeassistant) voice assistant.

    Or send it to me ;)

  • WaffleStomper@lemmy.world
    3·
    3 days ago

    I am currently in the process of de-Alexafying myself, and I had the same question. Unfortunately I haven’t found any real answers.

  • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    somehow amazon has managed to make fire products that no one seems to be able to jailbreak or such. I mean there is tons out there so its not like its not a good target.

    • moonshadow@slrpnk.net
      6·
      3 days ago

      Last I checked people were into both their tablets and tv sticks. “Jailbreak” an alexa and you end up with a shitty wireless speaker, not a lot of incentive there