I just realized that the reason there was a seat left on my recent flight to LAX, is that it is a Boeing MAX-9, row 26.

If you have read the NTSB Preliminary Report you will recognize this as the “door plug row” that caused a lot of excitement in January.

As an automotive engineer that works on safety relevant systems every day, I have pretty high confidence that lighting won’t strike twice, but I am still keeping my seatbelt on the whole flight.

Starting to see flowers coming up in Portland. The daffodils are always first, but whatever this bush is comes in pretty close after

Talk about unrealistic beauty standards. If this was really Oregon, it would be cloudy and everyone would be wearing sweatpants.

From Ray Atkeson’s book Oregon My Oregon.

It sucks having to turn off night mode to edit photos in bed.

Went to the local park today.

So far, we have discussed background on the Echo Dot V2, and why I am interested in reusing the hardware. We have also reused the amonet exploit to dump the eMMC of the dot. As a next step, before we dive into the existing bootloader process, it would be useful to see a dump of the boot logs of the echo dot. With many embedded linux systems, including android devices, a UART is included to provide lowlevel debug information about the boot process. Read more...

The first step in our process of hacking the Echo Dot is getting a dump of the EMMC, so that we can see if we can exploit the boot chain. We have specifically chosen the Amazon Echo Dot V2 in order to aid this process. First of all, this is the last version of the Echo Dot that has a real usb port integrated in the base device. Later versions of the Echo Dot use the micro-usb port for power only, and have a proprietary footprint for the debug USB connector. Read more...

The Echo Dot V2 is an interesting smart speaker, because while it uses a very common tablet SoC, there has been very little work published about trying to root the device. In the echo dot configuration, we have 512 Megabytes of RAM, and 4 Gigabytes of EMMC, so there is plenty of space to do interesting things. The prices have also gotten quite cheap, since the devices are getting long in the tooth, and it is easy to find sellers willing to part with them for almost nothing. Read more...