Ted Benson used a straightforward hack to repurpose Amazon’s quick-order button. Its intended use is to automatically order an item from Amazon when you push the button. Benson avoided that part, and instead used a button press to trigger other things.
A lot of people made fun of Dash Buttons when Amazon launched them on the day before April Fool’s Day. But regardless of what you think about Dash as a consumer product, it’s an undeniably compelling prototype of what the Internet of Things is going to look like.
If you have the right setup, you could be up and running with a button data collector in about ten minutes.
