Howdy!
I was super curious what was inside the Echo Auto Gen 2 and saw that no one had done a teardown online. I wanted to see if it would be easy to mod it to take USB-C, and then basically wrecked the damn thing by accidentally screwing up some of the capacitors. I did document the whole process, so I am hoping people will derive entertainment from my folly, at least!
Disclaimer — I am not a hardware engineer or anything of the sort. I am not advising you do this (I’m advocating the opposite, actually!) and am just posting this for entertainment purposes only. This device is clearly not meant to be user replicable.
Without further ado, here is my teardown!
The shell was hot-glued together, so I had to warm it up and pry it open with a screwdriver. I got a bit impatient and didn’t wait for the glue to soften completely, so I just kind of… forced it open with a flathead, destroying some of the plastic.
This is the portion that contains the speaker. There’s a few pieces of documentation on the inside as well as two metal contacts that are used to drive the speaker itself.
This is the portion with the speaker. It is just a speaker - positive and negative wires, plays sound. The amplifier is in the portion below:
This is the section facing away from the speaker. It contains the CPU and all the actual meat of the Echo. That connector with the hot-glued wires goes to the microphone and button assembly.
I gently removed the speaker assembly with my iFixit spudger. (not sponsored, I just want to let people know I kinda sorta know what I am doing!)
A bit of text was hidden underneath, but nothing too noteworthy. Then, I unscrewed the board entirely as well as the connectors. Here is what lay underneath all of the circuit/motherboard assembly:
Nothing terribly exciting. Before I moved on, I plugged the Amazon Echo Gen 2 in, and surprisingly, it did function just fine with the mic disconnected. Here’s a video of it working.
I guess there are no software checks to make sure the mic works — which is fair, I suppose.
Anyway, I flipped the board over, and here’s what lay underneath, towards that plastic base. It has a heat sink that’s adhered to the board.
Here is where I gone and truly messed up — I got stupid and lazy and instead of melting the adhesive, I just pried the heat sink off.
Unsurprisingly, I broke off a capacitor, permanently disabling the device. Whoops, but at least we can see the CPU now:
The Amazon Echo Auto Gen 2 uses a MediaTek MT7697HN CPU, which is a single core, 192MHZ low-power system-on-a-chip that is 32-bit, has integrated 2.4/5Ghz Wifi and Bluetooth 4.2 low energy, and out-of-the-box support for Amazon Web Services (go figure, right?). There’s an Olimex LPC2124 Header board as well as a Winbond W25Q256JW 256megabit (32 megabyte) flash memory chip.
And… yeah, that should about do it! Hopefully someone finds this interesting. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another Amazon Echo Auto Gen 2 to buy…
Didn’t know they bothered to make a second gen, does look better with the cloth and the design than the first gen.
Still just a glorified Bluetooth speaker/mic for your phone, though.