If you run Home Assistant and want a panel somewhere in the house, I think an old Echo Show is currently the best deal out there. This post covers why, which models you can actually use, and where to find the guides I followed.
Short version: Three Echo Show models can be unlocked and flashed with LineageOS: the Echo Show 5 (1st and 2nd gen) and the first-gen Echo Show 8. I paid €30 and €35 for mine, secondhand. The jailbreak took me about an hour and a half the first time and under 30 minutes the second. Afterwards the device runs as a Home Assistant panel with View Assist, with no Amazon software and no ads.
I didn’t figure any of this out myself. The jailbreak comes from Rortiz2 on the XDA forums, who found a way to unlock the bootloader on several older Echo devices in late 2025. The LineageOS builds for them come from bengris32, also on XDA.
Two videos got me to actually try it. Dammit Jeff’s Why you NEED to Jailbreak your Amazon Echo, where he unlocks a first-gen Echo Show 8, puts LineageOS on it and runs Home Assistant. And Mark Watt Tech’s full walkthrough for the Echo Show 5.
Echo Shows were sold in huge numbers, and plenty of them now sit in drawers. Some people upgraded, some got tired of Alexa, some got tired of the ads (more on that below). The result is that older models are all over eBay and the usual classifieds.
I paid €30 for my Echo Show 5 and €35 for the Echo Show 8, both secondhand from eBay and local classifieds. Prices move, so check the sold listings for the exact model and generation before you buy, but that’s roughly the range to aim for.
Strip away the software and an Echo Show is an Android device built to do exactly what a wall or counter panel needs to do. A touchscreen designed to be read from across a room and tapped in passing. Decent speakers and microphones. A stand that’s part of the case. A power supply instead of a battery, so it can run all day, every day, without anything swelling or wearing out.
Compare that with the usual alternative, an old tablet on a stand with a cable hanging out of it, and the Echo Show simply looks like it belongs in a home.
It’s not a powerful device, though. The first-gen Echo Show 8 has a MediaTek MT8163, 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage. That’s enough for a clean dashboard, a clock, controls and a camera stream. It’s not enough for heavy visual effects or a dashboard with forty cards on it. Keep things simple and it runs fine.
This is the one that annoys me most.
Echo Shows show sponsored content on the home screen, and you can’t switch it off. On Amazon’s own forum, a staff member told a customer in 2024 that sponsored content cannot be removed from the Echo Show. In October 2025 it got noticeably worse: owners reported full-screen ads between their photos and content cards, still with no opt-out. Amazon’s position is that you can swipe past them or leave feedback.
With Kindles, Amazon at least sells versions without ads, for more money. For the Echo Show there isn’t even that.
I don’t think the Kindle model is acceptable either. I already pay a good amount of money for a device like this, and with that I’ve bought it. It’s mine. Paying extra on top, just so the company that made it stops deciding what shows up on my screen, gets it backwards. Once I’ve bought a device, the manufacturer shouldn’t control what’s on it at all. Flashing is the only way I’ve found to get that control back.
This is the most important part of the post, because only a few models can be unlocked:
The Echo Show 8 2nd gen does not work. It uses a different chip that isn’t vulnerable to the exploit. Anything newer, or anything not on this list, assume it won’t work either.
When buying secondhand, listings often don’t mention the generation. One way to tell: the 2021 refresh came with better cameras, 2 MP on the Echo Show 5 2nd gen and 13 MP on the Echo Show 8 2nd gen. If a listing for an Echo Show 8 mentions 13 MP, that’s the one you don’t want. When in doubt, ask the seller for the model number or a photo of the label.
I’m not going to rewrite the guides here. They are maintained by the people who built this, and they get updated when something changes. But here’s the shape of it, so you know what you’re getting into:
One detail from the unlock thread that’s worth knowing: once the device is unlocked and TWRP is installed, Amazon can’t undo it with an update, because TWRP protects the partitions the exploit depends on.
You can brick the device. The guides are explicit that interrupting certain steps will permanently brick it, and they ask you to read the whole thing before you start. Do that. Twice.
The LineageOS builds are unofficial, and early builds had known issues with things like audio, Bluetooth and sensors. Read the release notes in the ROM thread for your model before you decide what you want to use the device for.
And it takes time. The first device took me about an hour and a half. The second one was done in just under 30 minutes.
The XDA threads, one per model. These are the actual guides:
The LineageOS builds have their own threads, for example LineageOS 18.1 for the Echo Show 5 1st gen. The Amazon Echo section on XDA has all of them in one place.
The videos that got me started:
Further reading:
No. Amazon’s own support says sponsored content can’t be removed. You can swipe past an ad or leave feedback, and that’s it.
Not with LineageOS. It replaces Fire OS completely, so Alexa and every other Amazon service are gone. The XDA guides also describe keeping Fire OS with root access, but I haven’t tried that route.
According to the unlock thread, no. Once the device is unlocked and TWRP is installed, the partitions the exploit depends on can’t be overwritten by an update.
Yes. Interrupting the process at certain steps will permanently brick the device. Read the guide for your exact model completely before you start.
A computer with a USB connection to run the unlock script, a running Home Assistant instance, and the View Assist integration installed in Home Assistant.
If you want to know what the result looks like in daily use, I wrote about that in Democratizing the smart home. And if you’d rather click your View Assist dashboard together than write the YAML by hand, that’s what PanelKit is for.
]]>At some point I noticed that the other adult in this house used almost none of it. Most of the apps were never installed, and how the pieces fit together was a complete mystery to them. What I got instead was the same question, again and again: can you dim the lights? In this room, in that room. I had turned into the remote control for my own smart home.
Which is fair. I never explained any of it, and honestly, I wouldn’t know where to start.
When people talk about democratizing the smart home, they usually mean cheaper devices or open standards that let everything talk to everything. Both matter. But they solve the problem for the person who sets things up. In a lot of homes, mine included, that person was never the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is everyone else who lives there. A smart home where one person holds all the knowledge isn’t shared, it’s run. Everybody else depends on that one person, and the dimming question is what that dependency sounds like day to day.
So for me, democratizing the smart home means that everyone who lives in the house can use it, without help, without installing anything, and without understanding how it works underneath. It’s narrower and more practical than the usual meaning, and it’s the one that decided whether my setup was actually used.
Looking at my own setup, that breaks down into three things it was failing at.
Access. If using the house requires an app, a login and the right dashboard, most people won’t use it. Not because they can’t, but because there’s no reason to bother when you can just ask.
Legibility. You should understand what you’re looking at in a glance. Entity names, device lists and status icons make sense to the person who built them and to nobody else.
Independence. Dimming the lights shouldn’t need me. Neither should checking who’s outside or putting on music. Every time someone has to ask, the system failed.
What made the difference wasn’t new hardware. We already had an Echo Show 5 on the counter, and nobody had to be talked into using it. People read the time off it and tapped it without thinking. In a shared home, that kind of acceptance is harder to get than any feature, and it covered access and legibility before I’d changed a single thing.
So instead of adding another device, I changed what this one does. I flashed it with LineageOS, which replaces Amazon’s software, and installed the companion app for View Assist. Which models can be flashed, what they cost and how the jailbreak works is in a separate post. Now it’s a Home Assistant panel. Same device, same spot, a completely different screen.
The default screen is a clock you can read from across the room, with the weather and the next appointments underneath. The background color shifts with the time of day. Most of the time that’s all anyone needs from it, and nobody has to touch anything.
When the Reolink detects a person, a banner appears on that clock screen. Tapping it opens the live stream, with a button for the floodlight next to it.
A bar on the right holds five icons: home, camera, music, lights, calendar. The lights page is the direct answer to the dimming question: each room, each light, large enough to hit without aiming. The music page controls the Sonos speakers, one room or several, with large volume buttons and the next songs in the queue. The calendar page shows the week from the shared iCloud calendars.
After a short while without a touch, the panel goes back to the clock on its own.
These are the rules I’d give anyone building a panel for a household rather than for themselves.
The idle screen has to be worth a glance. If the panel only becomes useful once you start tapping, it’s just another app on a stand.
Everything sits one tap away from the clock. Anything that needs a second level of navigation is something only I will use. That belongs in the regular Home Assistant dashboard, not on the panel.
No settings, no entity names, no status pages. When something breaks, I fix it from my laptop. The panel doesn’t need to explain itself.
It always returns home. Whoever walks by next shouldn’t find a music page someone left open an hour ago.
Democratizing the use of a smart home doesn’t democratize building it. Flashing only works on specific Echo Show models and firmware versions. It takes a few evenings, and if something goes wrong the device may not boot again. On top of that, View Assist and the custom cards I use mean a fair amount of YAML.
All of that still lands on one person. The difference is that it lands once, during setup, instead of every evening as a question about the lights. That’s a trade I’d make again.
The setup side is where I think the next step is. Not every household has someone willing to write YAML for weeks, and that’s the part I’m trying to make smaller.
PanelKit is my attempt at that: a visual editor for View Assist dashboards. Pick your screen, lay out the grid, drop in your cards, copy the result. You can try the builder here.
The full setup goes in the next post: flashing, View Assist, every integration, every card, and the places I got stuck.
]]>