techo5

README

TECHO5

Tech Echo 5 — an open, local-only firmware project for the Amazon Echo Show 5 (2nd generation, 2021, codename cronos).

The goal is a leaner and more capable replacement for the stock Alexa software: a Home Assistant voice satellite with an on-device wake word, a native media_player, and a dashboard display, with nothing leaving the house.

Why

The Echo Show 5 is a 5.5-inch touchscreen, a far-field microphone array, a speaker and a MediaTek MT8163 in a nice enclosure. Once the bootloader is unlocked it is a small Linux computer that only needs three jobs done well:

1. hear a wake word and stream audio to Home Assistant Assist,
2. play speech and music,
3. show a dashboard.

Android is a lot of machinery for that. TECHO5 aims to do those jobs with a small daemon and a kiosk, keep the hardware fully local, and stay easy to update.

Status

In daily use on a Show, with no Android at all: the unit boots its own Alpine Linux image and one daemon (echod/) does everything. It is a Home Assistant voice satellite with an on-device wake word and echo cancellation, a media player with radio and Bluetooth earbuds, a clock with weather, timers and alarms, a camera entity, and a touch settings sheet; it updates itself over the air from these releases into A/B slots with automatic fallback. docs/overview.md is the one-page description; docs/porting-plan.md is how it got here.

Getting there still takes an unlocked bootloader (amonet-cronos) and the first-install steps in tools/linux/README.md. A step-by-step guide for a new unit is being written from a first install on a second Show.

Screenshots

Taken from the device's own screen (/screen.png, with placeholders for names and addresses).

Clock, weather and the next alarm	A ringing alarm
Settings: Device	Settings: Alarms
Setting an alarm	Settings: Security
Settings: Theme

Running the daemon beside LineageOS (the older route)

Before the Linux image, the daemon ran as an init service on LineageOS 18.1. That still works, on a unit with USB debugging and rooted debugging enabled:

cd echod
$env:GOOS='linux'; $env:GOARCH='arm'; $env:GOARM='7'; $env:CGO_ENABLED='0'
go build -trimpath -ldflags '-s -w' -o ../bin/echod-arm ./cmd/echod
cd ..
.\tools\install-cronos.ps1 -Serial <adb serial> -Name "Kitchen" -KeyFile .\kitchen.psk

The installer puts the daemon in place as an init service, switches Android to its null audio HAL (the daemon owns the microphone and speaker), provisions the name, API key and wake word models, and reboots. Home Assistant then discovers the device as an ESPHome node; paste the key when asked. Android and any app on the screen keep running, silently.

Approach

EchoLocal (MIT) already turns the Echo Dot 2 (biscuit, the same MT8163 family) into an ESPHome-native Home Assistant satellite with a single static Go daemon that drives the hardware directly. TECHO5 brought that daemon to cronos, added the display, camera, Bluetooth and update layers it did not have, and put it on a minimal Alpine root filesystem in place of Android.

See:

• docs/hardware.md — what is known about the cronos hardware and the unlock path
• docs/porting-plan.md — milestones and open questions

Name

TECHO5 reads as "Tech Echo 5": the Echo hardware lineage and the 5.5-inch form factor. Style it TECHO5 or tEcho5.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

TECHO5 is not affiliated with Amazon. Echo and Alexa are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc.