Hey I’m Donald Bell for Maker Project Lab and in this video we’re going to take a look inside the new Amazon Echo Alexa-compatible version of the Big Mouth Billy Bass talking fish. I got this for around $40 on Amazon. I’ll leave a link in the video description, but you may want to watch this whole video and hear my opinion before picking one up.

Diving in

So here’s the fish. As some of you know, I’ve spent some time collecting and hacking these things. This one looks just like the others, same size, same idea, but there are two differences you can notice on the outside.

One is that there’s no hole on the plaque for the motion sensor, which is usually just a light-dependent resistor.

Second is the power jack and power supply. Typically it’s a barrel jack in the back and a basic DC power adapter. On this one though, you get a micro USB port on the bottom off to side a bit. It comes with a nice long USB cable and socket adapter.

On a practical level, this means you can power the fish over USB either on your table or the wall, without the cable getting in the way. In terms of hacking, it also means that the board and the motors in here are all optimized to run off 5 volts, which is great.

That said, you can also run it from batteries, but motors tend to suck up battery life pretty quick.

To get in here, you need to remove all the screws from the back. The catch is, they’re all TR10 security bit heads. I used an iFixit toolkit that had the right bit, and I’ll leave a link to that in the description. If you do this, I recommend putting something clean between the fish and the table because the rubber picks up dirt and dust and starts looking nasty.

Here’s what it looks like inside.

And here’s the board that’s making it all happen. And really, this is the only major component that’s different between this fish and any of the other ones.

Not only is this board handing audio playback and driving the two motors, but it also handles wireless communication with an Amazon Echo. Most likely that’s being handled by this part of the chip. You can tell because it has the antenna trace on the board.

I was also curious to see if the USB power jack was wired up to carry data in addition to power and it doesn’t look like it.

Beyond the board and the power input, you have the speaker, and wires running off to the two motors.

One motor is dedicated just to moving the mouth, and the other motor handles body movement. Run in one direction it makes the tail flap. Run in the other direction it makes the head come up.

The hook

So that’s what’s inside the new Alexa Billy Bass. As something to hack, I think it’s probably as good or better than the previous generations because it’s all been optimized for USB power.

But as an Echo accessory, I think it’s a little disappointing, even as a novelty. It doesn’t pass through any audio from the Echo, the mouth doesn’t sync up very well and only activates when Alexa is talking, not news or podcasts. They may fix some of these things.

Mostly though, it’s a bummer that it only works with Echo and is not broadly Bluetooth compatible. You can’t work this with your phone or a Google Home, it’s locked in.

That said, I do have an existing Instructable up on how to hack any Billy Bass to respond to any audio input. If you’re looking to hack yours, I still think that’s a good resource. I’m also working to get an updated version of that guide up to make it even easier.

Alright? Be sure to subscribe, and check out my Maker Update email list for more projects and hacks. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you soon.