Gadgetory

welcome to CNET's cracking open i'm jason Heiner with bill Dettwiler and today we're cracking open the Amazon fire cube so bill tell us about what Amazon's done with this device and why we're cracking and open what we're gonna do today yeah this is really cool because what amazon has done is they've taken their really popular alexa service and their echo devices and basically merged it together with their fire TV devices and this device not only lets you control the television via voice commands but some of your other components and so we thought it would be a really cool idea to take this apart to see what technology is inside it and to see how it does that also as a bonus I have a Amazon of fire TV stick and an Amazon fire TV of third generation one here I thought we could take those apart as well and compare the technology inside them to what's inside the fire tbq fair again yeah so let's take this thing apart here the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna remove the rubber base you can just this there's some double-sided tape on the rubber base so if we slip a tool in here and work our way around it we can pop this off fairly easily like so and so we get our first look at speaker inside the box and there are four Torx screws down in there we're gonna go ahead and remove those all right with the screws loose we are going to turn this over Wow the screws to come out so you can see we have one two three four screws and four washers it's always a good idea whatever we're taking things apart to try and keep track of your screws and keep track of what goes in what position with the with the screws out we can now lift out the guts the internal components of the device away from the plastic shell and so there we go we have our first look inside the fire TV cube also down in here we see the speaker assembly there are no wires connecting to speakers we flip this over we can take the speaker out and the speaker here is for Alexis feedback that you get obviously the audio that comes from the your signal your streaming signal would come out of your TV or your AV receiver whatever you have and there are no wires I found this really interesting there is just a contact there that connects the speaker to the internal components and now we turn our attention to the main components here we have a pair of circuit boards one on the bottom which has the inputs here the power inputs the HDMI outputs the IR blaster output and then we have a USB output here that goes with a it has Wi-Fi but you can use it with an Ethernet network adapter we see these small little cables here that connected to the connected to boards or these are likely 10 of cables and there's a flat cable here that connects the connection board so we're going to go ahead and remove those so Jason now that we have the amazon firetv cube out of its case yeah we can kind of see one of the ways that the device can control your other components right so it can control your AV receiver it can control your TV through the HDMI port if your devices support that but for devices that are not connected through an HDMI cable it can use infrared so it has a series of these IR blasters all around the device look at all of them yeah so it can sort of create it sort of bathed the area around it in an IR signal and that allows it to control things like your cable TV box other devices maybe that don't necessarily that aren't connected directly to it with an HDMI cable so billon would you couldn't just put this on top of your device right you would have to put it next to it or slightly in front of it or do that doesn't range it positions important with this device for a devices that may be in a cabinet yeah for devices that aren't close to it if you want to set it behind the device and it can't the signal can't reach the front of the device or wherever their receiver is they actually do have a little extender here that is at the bottom of it I actually had to use this I've been using the device for about a week and I had to use this cumi for my cable box all right let's go ahead and we're gonna take the I'm gonna keep this assuming this device we're going to take the circuit board off we're gonna separate the control board at the top and we'll see what's inside this metal body part of it here too whenever we're taking these devices apart we try to be really careful and not break any of the cables or the connectors with this around like this I don't like the yank cable nope so now we can see inside here there's nothing inside the space and we can see the cable is attached here with some adhesive so we have to be that's why we're real careful not to separate not to force those remote them we don't see any screws holding on the circuit board here at the bottom so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna try and see if we can't it probably just some adhesive it and it just pops loose there was some thermal a little bit of thermal fishing here more screws and so here what we can see here the contacts for the control buttons on the top usually and I can remove a little rubber buttons themselves and we can see the contacts a and we could for the control buttons we can see the LEDs the button over here we can see the row of LEDs there's a blue light that appears you know multicolor light that can appear on the first of this or the front of the device and here the LEDs here now we'll turn our attention back over to the circuit board here and we'll see if we can't remove the metal shields these are RF electromagnetic metal shields up and they fly off you're not careful yeah and now we get our first look at the chips underneath all right bill so we've got everything apart the amazon firetv cube and a couple of the other Amazon devices tell us what we're looking at and what we learn yeah so it's really cool to see the technology that makes a fire TV an Alexa enabled device and kind of like an echo so what you're holding is the fire TV stick and the fire TV a third generation fire TV and you can really see the similarities in the chips if they're basically almost identical on the third generation fire TV and the fire TV cube it's got an AM logic processor it's an S 905 Z and the one difference is the fire TV cube has a twice as much storage as the fire TV this one has a SanDisk chip in it for the storage what's really interesting is you can see the progression of the technology from the fire TV stick to the fire TV to the fire TV cube and we can see the technology that is required to sort of make this on like an echo and an Alexa enabled device without using the remote so it's really cool to see that all right so you have seen it the Amazon fire TV Cube cracked open find all of our cracking opens on CNET all of our cracking open photos on sister site TechRepublic and if you have a device that you'd like to see us crack open next leave us a note in the comments we're always looking for new stuff to break apart to learn about and to share our insights with you so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time