Amazon Echo Dot 3rd Gen Can Be Converted to Local Home Assistant Voice Satellite
The 3rd generation Amazon Echo Dot (2018 model, identified by 'donut' or D9N29T) can be re-purposed as a fully local Home Assistant voice satellite. This modification allows the device to retain Amazon's microphone array and wake word engine ('Alexa', 'Echo', 'Computer', 'Amazon', or 'Ziggy') while operating without cloud dependency. The process involves opening the device, soldering or clipping onto USB test pads, and unlocking the bootloader using the 'kamakiri-donut' exploit from XDA. A small daemon on the Echo then communicates with Home Assistant via its native API, making it appear as an ESPHome voice satellite. This setup maintains the Echo Dot's original audio stack, including echo cancellation, beamforming, and mic calibration, ensuring it can hear commands across a room and over its own music. All cloud services are stopped at boot, and a firewall restricts communication to local addresses only, preventing data transmission to Amazon.
