Official Amazon Power Adaptor for Echo Dot and Echo Show 5 | 15 W, Chalk, for Echo Dot (3rd/4th generation), Echo Show 5, Echo Spot and Fire TV Cube

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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.

Power Cable - Ronin 2 to Alexa 35 Ignite Digi Power Cable - Ronin 2 to Alexa 35

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. That won’t work because it’s likely that they’re also using “microphonics” effect of ceramic capacitors. I did a teardown on a broken 2nd gen Echo dot a while back out of curiosity, and I don’t remember really see anything in the echo that would warranty high value caps to lead to this – It had an array of 6 surface mounted mics spaced equidistantly around its periphery (each of which has holes through the device) so doubt it needs much else for doing its direction sensing, etc along with voice detection. 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. If you really want a “cover your ears” feature I would suggest doing something more direct than setting some pin high. Having lost zero devices to bad USB-A/Mini-B devices to bad ports, but countless cables, I see the trade-off differently. Maybe other physical phenomenas too like miniscule oscillations in CPU’s voltage regulator – this can be sensed and decoded although voice quality is abysmal.

Power Cable for Echo Dot (3rd Gen Replacement Compatible Echo Power Cable for Echo Dot (3rd Gen

This is the same reason USB type A and Mini-B ports can wear out in ways that require a device replacement/repair – the springs are on the device side of the interface.Wild speculation: the ‘cover ears’ test point is in the same signal path as the physical mute button. It was covered in the previous teardown, but there’s a physical chip that cuts power to the microphones (or at least, the ADCs) when it gets the signal. 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. 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.

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

Volutz micro-USB cables well over a year ago and I have had zero problems with them, where cheap cables would do well to last a couple of months.Brian] found that the Dot shows up as a Mediatek device under Linux using lsusb, and fastboot can see it and even confirms the presence of a locked bootloader. While they removed the external USB connector, the traces for it are still on the board waiting to be accessed.