HuskerMinion/techo5

What's new · Built on EchoLocal · Why · Screenshots · Stock vs TECHO5 · Install · Under the hood · Credits · TECHO5 Dot · TECHO5 Spot

TECHO5 (Tech Echo 5) is open firmware for the Amazon Echo Show 5. It replaces Android and Alexa with a small Alpine Linux image and one Go daemon, turning the Show into a fast, private Home Assistant voice satellite with a touch screen of its own.

Every Echo that can be unlocked now runs it. The bootloader exploit these devices are opened with, amonet, reaches five Amazon Echos. All five run the same daemon:

Every other device amonet opens is a Fire tablet. No Echo made after 2021 has a public unlock, so this is the whole family as it stands, not a roadmap.

Waking to light. For up to half an hour before an alarm the screen becomes a dawn, on a curve that does most of its work near the end. Every frame here is drawn by the code the device draws with.

The bigger changes of late September and early October 2026. Every release lists the rest.

Drawn on the device: instant, no server	Streamed: exactly as Home Assistant draws it

Home Assistant dashboards on the screen (v0.9.0). The Echo Show and the Echo Spot can show a dashboard as a page you swipe in from the left edge of the clock (on the Spot, from the ring menu), or in place of the clock when nothing else is on the screen. There are two ways, picked per device in Home Assistant:

• Drawn on the device. The device reads the dashboard's cards and draws them itself, in your theme's colors: tiles you can tap or slide for brightness, position and temperature, rows with switches, graphs, gauges, pictures and more. Taps are instant and nothing else is needed. With no dashboard picked, it builds a Rooms dashboard from your Home Assistant areas.
• Streamed. dashcast, a small server that runs next to Home Assistant (a Docker image for PCs and Raspberry Pis), opens the dashboard in a headless browser and sends the screen only what changes, encrypted with a key of your choosing. It looks exactly as Home Assistant draws it, custom cards included, and it can show built-in pages like Energy and History.

Which to use, how to set it up and what each can do: docs/dashboards.md.

Cover art for Music Assistant (v0.8.13). Music from Music Assistant, your own library included, now shows its album cover on the now-playing screen, the way radio stations already did. Music Assistant sends the picture itself, so there's nothing to set up. On the Spot it sits in a circle over the song.

• 📲 AirPlay and Spotify Connect (v0.9.25, new and untested). The Show and the Dot can be a speaker other apps play to, under the device's own name: AirPlay from an iPhone, iPad or Mac, and Spotify Connect from the Spotify app (Premium). Both are off until you turn them on, on the screen, the setup page or in Home Assistant, and what they play shows as now playing. Nobody has tried them with an iPhone or a Spotify account yet: if something does not work, open an issue. docs/setup.md
• 🛡️ A firewall on Wi-Fi (v0.9.25). The Show and the Spot now take nothing in over Wi-Fi but what they serve, as the Dot already did.
• ⚙️ Settings that are easier to find (v0.9.25). The long settings cards are grouped under headings, with what is changed most at the top, and the setup page opens Sound & Voice with the volume, wake word, quiet hours and do not disturb. The Spot's screen and the setup page also offer the Audio output choice, for a device with a headphone jack.
• 🚪 Talk through cameras (v0.9.24): answer the door from another room, straight to a camera's own speaker. docs/setup.md
• 🗣️ It stops listening when you stop talking (v0.8.14). After the wake word, the device hears you finish and ends the turn itself, instead of waiting for Home Assistant. With a TV or other voices in the room, that used to mean 10 to 15 seconds of listening, or a turn that timed out and did nothing. A switch per device, End of speech on the device, puts it back the old way.
• 🌙 A night light (v0.8.12, v0.8.13). Night hours can dim the screen to a faint glow instead of turning it off, and the first touch only brings it up. Music playing at night no longer keeps it bright, and Night light brightness (1 to 10) in Home Assistant sets the glow. Screenshot
• 🎵 Music that behaves (v0.8.9 to v0.8.13). A mini player strip over the clock with its own controls, Done and a favorite star on the now-playing page, pause and play that keep your place with Music Assistant, and answers and announcements that play over the music, ducked, instead of stopping it. Two ways a device could end up saying "Playing" in silence are fixed. Screenshot
• ⏰ Alarms and reminders (v0.8.1 onward). An alarm or reminder can ring once on a particular day, each alarm can choose its own wake light, and reminders can be set by voice ("remind me every Wednesday at 8 to take the trash out") with the automation in docs/actions.md. Screenshot
• 🔁 A Restart button in Home Assistant for every device (v0.8.13): restarts the TECHO5 software the way an update does, for when something is stuck and you'd rather not unplug it.
• 🌧️ Sleep sounds (v0.8.14). "Play the sounds of rain" no longer brings up the forecast, and a sound file served by Home Assistant shows its own name on the now-playing page.
• 🎙️ More by voice, with ready-made Home Assistant automations in docs/actions.md: set, cancel and list alarms ("cancel the 6 AM alarm", "what alarms do I have"), and change the volume on the speaker you're talking to rather than every speaker in the room.
• 📺 The Echo Show 8 (v0.8.0) runs the same software, laid out for its bigger screen. Screenshots

TECHO5 started from EchoLocal by Yuri Gelfand (MIT), which 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's echod is that daemon, vendored and ported to the Show 5's cronos, and much of it is still EchoLocal's code: the wake word engine, the ALSA client and the service framework almost unchanged, and the voice satellite, media player and component registry grown from EchoLocal's own. What TECHO5 added is the Show's hardware, the screen, the camera, Bluetooth, the update and slot system, phone calls, and a minimal Alpine root filesystem in place of Android. See NOTICE for the full attribution and EchoLocal's license.

Straight from the device's own screen. All of them, including the Echo Show 8 and the Echo Spot, are in docs/screenshots.

Clock, weather and your own photos behind it	Alarm ringing, big enough to hit half awake
Now playing, with the album's cover	The mini player, over the clock
The glance strip: chips from Home Assistant, only while they have news
Settings by category, grouped under headings: brightness, night, look, home screen, weather	Sound & Voice: the speaker, then voice, quiet, music and cameras
Alarms set on the device, no app needed	Privacy: every open door has a switch
Themes: presets or your own colors	Connections: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Home Assistant proxy
Weather now and for the week, with the rain radar a tap away	Cameras and Radio, a swipe in from the right

The Echo Spot takes the same twenty minutes across its round face.

New to this? Start with Getting started: every step from a stock Echo Show 5, Dot or Spot, with the unlock guides linked, what to check after each step, and notes for Windows, Linux and macOS. Once it's in Home Assistant, Setting it up covers photos, weather, cameras, music and the night settings, in order.

You need a Show 5 unlocked and running LineageOS 18.1 — 2nd gen with amonet-cronos and this ROM, 1st gen with amonet-checkers and R0rt1z2's checkers build of the same LineageOS — a USB cable, a computer (Windows, Linux or macOS) with Python 3, adb and fastboot, and Home Assistant. Each release carries everything else: the boot image (with Bluetooth) and the root filesystem. Nothing is built.

git clone https://github.com/HuskerMinion/techo5
cd techo5
python3 tools/install-show.py

It finds the Show, asks what to call it and asks once before erasing anything (or takes --serial, --name and --force from a script), downloads and checks the release, flashes the boot image, creates the slot store and installs over the USB serial console, and prints where the Home Assistant key is kept. Later updates come from Home Assistant. Every step by hand, and the fixes for what can go wrong: docs/install.md.

Status: in daily use on two Echo Show 5 units. It's a hobby project, not a product: keep your backups, and expect rough edges.

Echo Show 5 1st gen (2019, checkers) installs with the same command: the installer sees which generation it is talking to and takes that unit's boot image from the release. Everything works on it — screen, touch, speaker, microphones, wake word, camera, the mute button and voice — tested end to end, though so far on one unit rather than the two years of daily use behind the 2nd gen. The hardware notes are in techo5-checkers.

Echo Show 8 1st gen (2019, crown) installs with the same command as well. Its screen, touch, speaker, four microphones, wake word, camera, lens cover and mute latch all work, and it takes slot updates like the others. It is the newest of the three and has been through far less use than either Show 5, so treat it as such. Two things worth knowing first: a seller's model number does not tell the two Show 8 generations apart, so go by the year when buying second-hand, and cycling the mute latch stops the camera until the unit is rebooted.

• docs/overview.md: the one-page description of how it all fits.
• docs/porting-plan.md: how it was built, step by step, dead ends included.
• docs/hardware.md: the cronos hardware and the unlock path.
• docs/camera-research.md: driving the camera's ISP from userspace.
• docs/building.md: building it yourself: where every input comes from (tools/fetch-inputs.py), and the daemon, kernel, boot image and root filesystem builds, for each OS.
• tools/linux/README.md: the image tooling in detail.

TECHO5 Dot does the same for the Echo Dot 2nd generation: Linux in place of Fire OS, all seven microphones, Bluetooth speaker mode, signed updates. TECHO5 Spot does it for the Echo Spot (1st gen), on its round screen. All three run the same daemon source, built per device.

TECHO5 exists because of these projects and the people behind them.

The path here

• EchoLocal (MIT, Yuri Gelfand): the daemon TECHO5 is built on (see Built on EchoLocal), and go-esphome-device, the ESPHome device API it speaks.
• amonet-cronos and kaeru (k4y0z, R0rt1z2): the bootloader unlock and recovery that make any of this possible.
• @proffalken: the step-by-step install from Linux that Getting started and the cross-platform installers are based on.
• LineageOS 18.1 for cronos (unofficial, R0rt1z2), built on Amazon's GPL kernel source: the kernel TECHO5 rebuilds and the vendor drivers it keeps. TWRP stays as the way back.
• ShowAssist and the View Assist Companion App (Mark Parker): what ran the Show before TECHO5, and the first proof it could be a Home Assistant satellite.
• jxlarrea/lineageos-echo-show-camera: the OV02B10 camera driver and sensor fixes, the privacy latch, and echo cancellation work on the Echo Show family.
• bengris32/linux-mtk: the mainline MT8163 effort, a map of the hardware.
• The BQ Aquaris E10 GPL source release: MediaTek's ISP register map for this chip generation, which let the camera run from userspace.
• @Empty2k12: the first hardware findings from an Echo Show 5 1st gen (checkers), including the recipe that made its speaker play, in pull request #2.
• @JonGilmore: every 1st gen build tested on a real unit, two days of it. The microphones, the mute latch cutting their power, the camera and the spoken replies were all found or confirmed from what he reported.

What runs on the device

• microWakeWord (Kevin Ahrendt), the ESPHome wake word models, and zserge/microwakeword for Go.
• Home Assistant and ESPHome: Assist, the native API, and the reason to build any of this.
• Music Assistant and Sendspin.
• Radio Browser, through Home Assistant's integration, for stations near home.
• The rain map and weather alerts: the U.S. National Weather Service for the radar and the alerts (public domain), with the radar's map tiles from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet at Iowa State University; RainViewer for the radar outside the U.S.; NASA's GIBS for the Blue Marble map and NOAA's GOES satellites' clouds; and GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) for the town names.
• Alpine Linux, BusyBox, Dropbear, wpa_supplicant, BlueZ, bluez-alsa (arkq), and webrtc-audio-processing.
• Go libraries: go-mp3 (Hajime Hoshi), godbus, gorilla/websocket, zeroconf, mewkiz/flac, pion/opus, cobra, viper, protobuf and the Go fonts; for calls, diago and sipgo (Emir Aganovic), Pion SRTP and RTP, and zaf/g711.

See NOTICE for licenses of code carried in this repository.

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

MIT. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

TECHO5 isn't affiliated with Amazon. Echo and Alexa are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc.