I have an old 2nd Gen Echo (2018), and a 4th Gen Echo (2020). They have reasonably good speakers and mic arrays, but I’m ready to move on from the Amazon processing. Have there been any successful (and approachable for a normy with spunk but not a lot of experience) projects repurposing the hardware for local HA? Even something that includes replacing the brain to use the other bits seems like a fine approach to me.
The brains of an Amazon Echo are in California, so good luck with that! 
There’s a discussion here, but it doesn’t look simple.
Thanks for doing my forum search for me…(sorry for not searching better)
Yeah, looks a bit more technical than I have the know-how for right now. I guess there’s always Ebay if I want to avoid the ewaste recycler.