This feels like bad design
Smart pet-feeder company Petlibro suffered an outage on Tuesday, giving users a harsh reminder of the risks of relying on smart devices.
Petlibro makes pet feeders that connect to Wi-Fi and, for setup with Petlibro’s mobile companion app, Bluetooth. Users can set the feeders to automatically dispense food at scheduled times, which is handy for pet care when the owner is out of the home.
In a statement to The Verge, Petlibro CEO York Wu said this week’s outage was “related to how the Petlibro app communicates with devices through its online servers.”
Some user reports have also conflicted with Petlibro’s claims about offline functionality. As The Verge pointed out, various users online claimed that during the outage, their devices did not perform any scheduled feedings, performed some feedings but not others, or performed feedings late (examples here, here, here, here, and here).
Happy user of petlibro here and I’m very happy that when I bought it, I went explicitly for the non wifi - non cloud connected version.
Why can’t these as schedules be held locally in the device memory.
But then they cant turn off the servers in 18 months, forcing you to buy a new one?!
The answer is lazy design. It was cheaper and easier to make it a dumb device that gets all direction from a server. Less complexity and more control on their end. Also, subscription.
My fish tank feeder had a clock, and I set the times. To feed it. There shouldn’t be any smart needed.
Again, why do we need to unnecessarily complicate stuff with multiple IoT options?? Why can’t it have a fallback offline like idk…a SIMPLE TIMER? Or is it another case of “AI integration” into yet another thing which doesn’t need AI!
it’s because shareholders want the company to “innovate” and in a space where nothing can really improve these devices people will add whatever is new or trendy. IoT and cloud stuff is still very trendy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were startups or devices based on AI pet feeder tech.
Not because it’s new and good, but because shareholders want money to go up.
What’s wrong with a ficking bowl?
Cats greed-stuffing until they barf. My orange one killed a roomba that way.
Some cats are fucked in the head. Don’t ever get a Bengal.
Thankfully I got one of the older models with zero IoT functionality. Works very well
Same here, I think we’ve had it close to ten years now. After seeing how the cats respond to it we started calling it The Food God.
The level of sophistication of our pet feeder at home is a fistful of kibble pulled out of a bag and dropped in a bowl. If we’re away, we have a good neighbour who drops in to check on the cat, or the cat stays with my family. I’m an IT professional, and prefer my house to be as dumb as possible.
Of course I will post a picture of my cat when mentioning him. His name is Nemo.
Nemo appears to be starving. You should ensure nemo is given many treats to fix this problem.
His hunger is insatiable, as evidenced by his annoyed moaning whenever he glimpses the bottom of his food bowl. His foster home had turned him into a mega-chonk, but I got him in the right track. Now he’s part killing-machine, part cuddle-machine.
Nemo is such a beauty, he looks very soft and cuddly.
Thank you. He’s indeed soft and cuddly, though also drooly and clawy. We love him.
Again, why do we need to unnecessarily complicate stuff with multiple IoT options?? Why can’t it have a fallback offline like idk…a SIMPLE TIMER? Or is it another case of “AI integration” into yet another thing which doesn’t need AI!
To everyone criticizing the people who bought the device: It is sold as being capable of running without internet, and it often does. The problem is that some update along the way broke this functionality ( maybe on purpose ).
The device has 3 D batteries to survive even power outages.
I’m not defending the company, I absolute despise them, they lied to consumers and should suffer a class action lawsuit.
Repeat after me: Local control. Local control. Local control.
“The Cloud” is just other people’s computers.
Home Assistant, my beloved.
Spread your knowledge, but most are not motivated or equipped
automatically dispense food
Okay
use an app to set it up
Makes sense
cloud outage caused missed feedings
wtf? Doesn’t the thing have an internal clock? Doesn’t it just set a cron job? Seriously, if you want to farm data all day long, do that and just send it back. But if having to be online to do its core function is required, that’s extremely poor design.
They can’t charge a subscription for an internal clock
Or push ads, or gather data on users.
“So we create an unnecessary dependency to force them to upgrade whenever shareholders demand it. There’s a slight chance a malfunction will starve cats to death buuuuuut….”
“smart” device
And this is why you use local only devices fools.
Get yourself a Zigbee Pet Feeder and pair it with Home Assistant and you’re good to go.
Why in fuck would a device that activates a motor once or twice a day on a schedule need any kind of network connectivity? This is an ultra-dumb programmatic function, it shouldn’t need any more compute power than an alarm clock. Why would you hook it up to a smart home anything?
It should be exactly this complicated:
Anything beyond that is like killing a housefly with a bazooka.
Totally agree (keep it simple) and I use a simple timer failsafe on mine, but just pointing out:
Minimum interval of that plug will fill the bowl jam the motor. Gears will strip without intervention.
Nbd tho, you can wire up a secondary timer relay circuit for portion control. Just keep the wires tidy, and raised if there’s a water bowl nearby.
And probably don’t want 220 anywhere near the feeding area so use a 5v wall wart or whatever.
Eh, might also want to consider a battery backup option in case power goes out while you’re on a work trip.
Just make sure to keep both interfaces accessible for later manual adjustments. Can take a while to dial it in, you know, based on current activity levels, which can change seasonally. Also be ready to fuck with it pretty much any time you switch their feed.
Etc etc
I kid — I’m sure you get why nerdy control freaks wire these things up to HA and whatever
I’ve got a dispenser that basically works like a gumball machine. Goes every day and only needs to be refilled maybe once every month or two. Even has a battery backup in case the power goes out while we’re on vacation or something. No need for smart home integration, just listen to your pet when they complain that they don’t have any food, and make sure you’re full up before leaving for an extended amount of time.
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It would be nice if there is list of devices/companies which support local integration, it there anything?
Which do you recommend?
I got the cheapest timer-based one I could find ($18) and spliced the 5v motor wires with a Shelly switch (flashed for local-only matter).
I settled on this solution after 3 prior attempts with more expensive feeders because none of them let me control portions and regularity adequately, which ultimately comes down to “cycle hopper motor N seconds at T1, T2, … , TK for K meals/day.”
That’s been doing its job for nearly two years, cat’s weight stabilized, and his feast/famine eating behaviors disappeared, so I couldn’t recommend anything more complex than that.
ETA: only important if you travel but…
Also added a small relay that reconnects internal AA battery pack on power loss. Which converts unit back to a self-contained timer-based feeder.
The only time that has triggered is when unplugging the unit to clean or when I’ve accidentally turned off the power strip’s energy monitor plug. Not important unless you’re away from home a lot and/or outages are common in your area.
Aquara C1. Use Home Assistant and your own Zigbee antenna.
I have someone coming for check-ins, but they can’t come in 5 times every day to give food,” a Reddit user said.
You can pamper your cat however you want, but your cat is not going to die if they don’t have someone portioning out food five times a day.
The cat we had when I grew up was perfectly fine with having a bowl of dry feed over the day and night, getting wet food in the evenings.
