Creative uses for an Amazon IoT Dash

August 17, 2017 7:54 PM

I read somewhere that a guy had programmed his AWS IoT Dash button so that he could press it whenever Drumpf said something hateful and send $5 to the ACLU. Mine was delivered today and I'm seeking creative ideas for what to do with it. Donating money is sadly not in the budget right now nor is shopping in general.

I just started learning React this week, so anything that can be Reactified would be plusgood.

posted by bendy to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: If I had one (and the skills to program it), I'd put it by the snack cabinet and have my kid push it every time he got a snack, and make it show the count on my phone. (He has a "budget" for snacks so he can decide when and what to eat himself, but within a strict limit.) I imagine you could do similar to count every time you refill your water bottle, to see how many ounces you're drinking. Or to track how many wet diapers you change on your newborn every day. Anything you wanted to count each day, or track timing on.

I've also read about people hacking them to send short messages/e-mails/phone alerts ... in the specific one I saw, latchkey kids would press the dash button by the door right when they got home and it would text mom and dad "Hi, it's Sara, I got home at 4:15" so that they didn't have an excuse of forgetting or not having time to text. (My husband and I do similar things with phone apps, fire off automatic texts to each other on long commutes and so on, so I can think of a fair number of use cases for "Hi, I'm here" dash buttons to alert someone.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:13 PM on August 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Yeah, some of the best hacks I've seen have been along the lines of personal accountability logging. If you feel like you should log whether you did [thing you're lukewarm about doing but you think you should do], it's nice to be able to just hit the dash button.
posted by craven_morhead at 8:14 AM on August 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for the idea Eyebrows and craven_morehead (I think I just understood your user name. :))

I could probably use it to track beers that I drink, but I'd rather not. A friend suggested that every time I click it, it would give her dog a treat from three blocks away.

The button has three different actions, click, double-click and long press so I'll keep thinking. So far I haven't succeeded at making it complete the simplest task - the "hello world" email!
posted by bendy at 7:31 PM on August 20, 2017