“I’ve had a pretty chaotic few weeks and come weekend I like to chill out and tinker with little projects on my backlog. Months ago I bought some Amazon Dash buttons with every intention of using them but never actually getting around to it. It’s time to change that and what better than integrate one of them with Let’s Encrypt!
Weekend Project
I’ve always loved tinkering around with technology and I love little weekend projects to take my mind off work. I recently setup a Raspberry Pi to act as a DNS filter on my network using PiHole which was a great short project and something to have fun with that was also useful. I wanted to follow a trend here and finally put the Amazon Dash buttons I bought to good use.
I’d bought a few Dash buttons but hadn’t yet thought of what to use them for (I commonly buy stuff because it looks cool and think of a use for it later) but then I had a great idea. After my recent HTTPS Anti-Vaxxers post I came away feeling like we still needed more encryption in the world and an idea was born…
Let’s Encrypt Dash Button
My goal was to create a Let’s Encrypt Dash Button so that any time I felt sad about there not being enough encryption in the world I could hit the button and have a Let’s Encrypt certificate issued! Hacking the Dash Button to do custom things shouldn’t be too hard and Let’s Encrypt provide certs for free so this should be a quick and easy project. Let’s dig in.
Purchase and Setup
If you need a Dash Button you can get them on Amazon for £4.99 or $4.99 right here. If you’re really keen on getting the £4.99 back then get a Dash Button for something you will actually order and if you use the button to order it then Amazon will knock the price of the button off the product! I didn’t do that and I just picked a few buttons to play around with. I was going to peel the labels off and put my own stickers on them so it didn’t matter which I bought, otherwise just pick ones you like the look of I guess. Go through the setup instructions which you can find here but do not complete the step where you link the button to a product, just quit the app. This means you will be abandoning the setup process before completing it which is what you need to do.”