Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed
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).
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 T~1~, T~2~, … , T~K~ 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.
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.
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
Some cats can’t have free access to food or they get fat. Some cats can with no weight gain. I have two sister cats where one is the latter and one is the former.
i don't have one yet, but we're planning to get one so we can go on overnight or even maybe 2-3 day trips without having to rely on someone coming around to feed the pets
overnight is fine but for 2,3 days still have someone drop by to check if things are fine at least once. i read horror stories of cats being cats and landing badly from a sleeping spot and breaking a leg, or cats in a freak accident turning on the hair dryer which proceeded to blow warm air into the apartment for the whole night. and of course insanse stuff like that will happen when nobody is there to check in.
It doesn’t need it, no, but it makes life a little easier. And in this world of constant demands on our attention and time, making our lives a little easier is a vast blessing.
Some cats are psycho about food. Mine definitely, and screams at me for hours a day even though he knows when feeding time is and he still has food from breakfast. People recommend an automatic feeder because the cat stops associating the person with feeding time and bothers the feeder instead. I haven’t tried it yet, but it makes sense to me and would probably work on the fat cunt
If you work long shifts or overnights, maybe your cats need food more often, so what do you do. Free feed, but many experts advise against that. Well, there are various options.
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.
We have some and in our case it isn’t about the timer function but the RFID tags on the cat collars because one will steal from the other two.
I can’t speak for anyone else but they kept working for us. Only possible difference I can think of is that we did make sure to put in the optional D cell batteries.
“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….”
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I’ve had cats all my life and never had one that couldn’t have a bowl of food out at all times. Throwing up doesn’t mean they eat too much, just that they eat too fast, like, yanno, when they think they’re going to be starving until the next meal.
So you tried to defeat someone else’s experience with an anecdote where you have not had that experience. What even are you trying to say here?
Lots of people’s cats have behaviors like this. Feeding them a certain amount on a fixed schedule helps. We have six cats. One of them is like this. It’s a pain in the ass.
I’ve got 3 cats, one who wouldn’t hesitate to eat the food of all 3. Very difficult to manage as the other two only nibble away slowly at their food. Solution I can’t up with is 3 RFID feeders that only open for the right cat, works great.
I’m trying to figure out if I can emulate the online server portion of the stack to remove the cloud requirement.
Some cats are gobblers, some are grazers. Currently we have two gobblers, and one obligate grazer who throws up if she eats more than a tablespoon or so of food at a time. The logistics involved in making sure she gets enough without the other two stealing her food are . . . tedious.
The gobbler tendency may show up more often in rescue cats, who are likely to have been through rough patches here and there—we’ve never taken in a cat who was less than eight months old, so their habits are set before they get to us. Or it may just be a genetic quirk.
I have three cats. A chonk, an old lady with kidney issues, and the other guy. When there was no restriction on who got what chonk was very chonky and the other guy was pretty skinny. Everyone but chonk are grazers so it’s not even a matter of separating him from them during meal time, unless I’m banishing him for like three hours. Also both the chonk and the other guy would love to eat old lady’s prescription $30/lb food.
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.
There is a subscription service, but it’s not required. I don’t have it, but my pet got fed during the outage so maybe there’s a different line of devices that don’t work without the subscription…
My pets got fed through the entire outage. I did not care to get a 100% reliable solution, as it is just a convenience for us. Not something we rely on. Actually relying on 100% on this is a bad idea.
At this point the most annoying part for me has been the wild amount of emails and info about this outage.
I kind of think that someone who relies on this 100% of the time maybe shouldn’t have a pet. Pets need company and affection. I mean, I’d love to get a dog again but now I’m just working too much and it wouldn’t be fair.
I use it to make sure that our pets don’t go hungry for long. So that they don’t eat everything and then have to wait for 6 or 12 hours until the next feeding. So I just feed them every two hours automatically.
It could be that their work schedule makes it so they’re not home for meal times, but are home for other times
It could be that people happened to be traveling for this and most cats are fine with an occasional day or two home alone.
It could be that some of them are really bad with daily scheduled tasks and need something to help take that load off.
Maybe consider not being super judgemental about how people manage their pets, there’s perfectly reasonable reasons why people might want, or even need, an auto feeder.
Sounds like a dumb way to feed your pet that the device can’t work without the cloud. Nothing new but still you have to be real stupid to buy a device that will one day be cut off when the company abandons support.
Ah yes, the classic “the stupid consumers are stupid” argument.
This was sold as being an offline-capable device. It even has battery slots for power outages.
Perhaps instead of shitting on people for buying something they thought would be nice and work well, we shit on the company that can’t even give a pet feeder an on-device offline schedule after selling people on a device that’s supposed to work offline and even during power outages.
And figure out how we can hack it and enable folks to control the hardware they own, because they weren’t stupid for buying a pet feeder. The company that runs it just does so in a moronic way.
(I don’t own one of these, but I have considered it a few times, and this just pisses me off)
I’ve bought two cloud connected devices that promised manual control. Only one did. It was the first thing I did was verify it was true by never using the cloud part of it.
These smart gadgets could be good but they are so terrible. I bought a discount smart LED bulb. I was like let’s try it out, it can’t be that bad. Then I realized why was it discounted:
The lightbulb does not work without being connected to the internet, it just flashes in the most annoying way.
Nowhere on its box it was written, hey you have to connect this lightbulb 24/7 to the internet. Just some nice things, like you can dim it and change the colors. Not to mention these shady apps selling your data, asking access for your contacts, pictures and files.
They far overdid the opportunistic predation in many ways.
I can easily imagine a nightmare, where everything people own, get locked down this way. The world is going into that direction.
They can design the device to be standalone, with increased hardware costs…or farm that processing to their servers, with the bonus of also giving them the ability to kill it on command so you just have to buy a new one and having lots of metric data to sell
I guarantee you the microcontroller that handles the wifi is 10x more powerful than what would be required to just run an offline schedule. There’s no processing involved… It’s not like this is using a camera + AI to see if your cat is too fat.
Edit: I just looked up this model and its actual features… it’s not that far off, since it seems to run image recognition to tell when the cat is eating. If they’re streaming video back to the cloud for processing, that sounds even worse than what I was expecting. It would be entirely possible to run a small image recognition model locally in a product like this.
There are much simpler solutions like the ones that detect a chip in the pets collar (or the embedded id chip most pets have)
It is bad design. The entire system control could be on a microcontroller inside the machine itself. There’s no reason to route data through a cloud server just for basic functionality (other than greedy data farming, of course).
That’s a single point of failure, and not even very reliable, for something that provides a basic necessity to a living being.
That being said, any pet owner who relies on an automated feeder and doesn’t check it regularly to make sure it’s working properly, is neglecting their pets. They share a portion of the responsibility here.
Still, I wish products marketed for pets were regulated better to ensure safety.
When I bought my house there were a bunch of smart gadgets - lightbulbs, thermostat, fridge - and after a couple of months I’d gradually disabled all the smart features because they were causing more problems than they were fixing. The cold December day when we didn’t have any heating because a fucking server was down was the worst.
