Alexa are you always listening I only
send audio back to Amazon when I hear
you say the wait word for more
information and to view Amazon's privacy
notice visit the Help section of your
Alexa app anyways this is the second
generation Amazon echo dot and it's a
personal assistant that essentially
gives your existing speakers Alexa's
eyes and ears so that way you can speak
to play music check the weather and give
her all kinds of other commands but
there's one question that we're
interested in Alexa
what are you made of I'm plastic metal
and lots of ones and zeros well we'll
find out about that because this is
gadget gun alright it's time to talk
about the guns what can we expect to see
inside of the echo dot so Alexa can
speak and listen so there's bound to be
a microphone array and probably a small
speaker in there we've also got some
tactile buttons and really cool LEDs so
those will probably be attached to a PCB
the ports on the back could be tough is
the same board but we might be looking
for a second one in there and at first
glance I don't see any screws so I'm
going to start prying to get the thing
open
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so it looks like I peeled the adhesive
off of the no-slip pad just fine when
peeled it off - and looks like yeah
we've got four Torx screws all right so
these ended up being t8 Torx screws and
they're actually pretty long which is a
good sign because if these are threaded
all the way through hopefully there's
less adhesive than there were on the
previous generation if you check out the
guide you'll see we practically made a
throwing star and at the last echo dot
with the amount of pics that we had to
use to pry it open all right so if I
lift off the base and we're finally into
the guts of everything to start we're
going to get to all the boards and
everything else in a minute but there is
a hunk of plastic on the base and I
think it might how is the speaker
alright so inside this hunk of plastic
we have our small speaker and the
plastic looks like it's designed in a
way to amplify the sound that comes out
of the bottom of the echoed on the
speaker is pretty small so although you
could play music if you're a music
junkie like me you're going to want to
use the auxiliary port on the back to
connect it to bigger speakers and pretty
much it this is pretty lightweight I
don't think there's anything else going
on inside so let's move on to the board
there is not a whole lot holding this
together in fact there's one ribbon
cable keeping everything together and
it's connecting the motherboard to the
bottom PCB with the LEDs and the
microphones on it I think if I
disconnect this ribbon cable leave the
rest of it should fall apart so I'm
going to grab a subject and
take this off all right so we've got the
dot disassembled and Alexa was right
she's made up of layers of plastic and
metal and to PCB that's pretty much it
but there is some cool tech on here so
let's take a look at this board so this
is a board that sits underneath the
buttons and the light ring and on it
it's got seven microphones six along the
outside and one right there in the
center and they use some cool technology
to help you communicate with Alexa these
four chips in the middle are analog to
digital converters or a DC's and they
essentially act as translators for you
and Alexa you speak to Alexa in an
analog voice and the ADC translates that
into a digital voice that Alexa can
understand and then a DAC a digital to
analog converter which is on the
motherboard then takes that digital
voice and makes it analog again which is
what you hear coming out of the speakers
in your echo dot on the other side of
this PCB we've got for tactile dome
switches the switch that belongs to the
action button has a light sensor on it
that adjusts the LEDs according to the
brightness of your room and that's about
it for that PCB let's move onto the
motherboard so to start we have a media
tech power management IC which converts
voltage coming from your USB and then we
have our system ownership wireless
module that houses all your Wi-Fi and
Bluetooth and GPS capabilities in the
center here we have a 64-bit quad-core
arm cortex a53 CPU which is a mediatek
chip that does all the things in this
chip is a combination of those flash
indirect
although the FO dot has some new and
slightly invasive technology once you
get it open it's really not that scary
inside and honestly it's way easier to
disassemble but a lot of the stuff that
you tear down every game if there's
another gadget that you'd like to see
the guts of comment below and tell us we
might just feature it on our next video
see you next time
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