This Guy Hacked An Amazon Dash Button To Remotely Cool His Tesla
By Paulo Acoba
This programmer by day hacked an Amazon Dash button to precondition his Tesla upon entering.
Give this guy a job at Tesla. According to /user/badrowbot on Reddit earlier yesterday (Sept. 28, 2015) a buddy (Michael Donnelly) of his hacked (both literally and figuratively) an Amazon Dash Button to do whatever he wanted, in this case to precondition the temperature of his Tesla before he entered the vehicle. Technically an Amazon Dash button is a little button provided by Amazon you place anywhere in your house to order specific products its linked to. For example, if you have a Gerber Baby Food Amazon Dash button and you notice you’re low on baby food, a simple press of the Gerber Baby Food Amazon Dash Button will order you up a case much needed child nourishment as soon as possible. Michael made a quick video of how he did it as well as a demonstration. Check out that video below!
Michael’s program, like many others, noticed that by locating the MAC address of an Amazon Dash button by “listening” to its location over the WiFi network on which it connects, instead of running the code to order up product, you can run whatever code you programmed it to do. The only limits are your imagination and programming prowess. Michael utilised the same Tesla Model S JSON API used by the iOS and Android apps and modified the code using Python programming code to run anytime an Amazon dash button was pressed, in this instance, to modify the temperature of his Tesla Models S. In addition, he also programmed one of his Philips LED light bulbs to come on and display a bright red while his air temperature was being queried.
The first press of the Amazon Dash button gets the temperature of his Tesla, then a second press of the Dash button begins the cooling process to get the current temperature reading to the desired set point. Mind you, the Tesla Model S is fully electrical and uses an electric AC compressor to cool the air rather than a regular internal combustion engined car which must have the motor running in order to cool the car down.