Ingenuity is born out of necessity and in this case, the necessity was a way to get a four-year-old to be able to listen to the Moana soundtrack when she wished.
So Tanya Reilly, a Carroll Gardens-based engineer who works at Google, put together a way to get her Amazon Dash buttons programmed to play music over her house’s Sonos speakers.
“Here’s how it works: whenever you push the button, it generates ARP traffic on your wifi network,” Reilly writes on her blog. “You can set up a server on the network — perhaps a Raspberry Pi that’s been looking for a purpose! — and use the scapy library to listen for your button’s MAC address. Then you can take some action whenever you see that it’s been pushed.”
I made a button that plays Hamilton.https://t.co/7igVUEYzBK pic.twitter.com/NLKEoXPTnp
— Tanya Reilly (now at @whereistanya@hachyderm.io) (@whereistanya) April 11, 2017
She goes on to offer code and a full GitHub repo for how to do this.
Reilly installed more than Moana, though. She’s also got the Hamilton soundtrack, Beyonce’s Lemonade and some Bach. A home jukebox at the touch of a repurposed button.
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