While all this was happening, I was finally getting my old broken PetNet feeder working again. I wrote did it using ESPHome, and wrote up a blog post about it [

While all this was happening, I was finally getting my old broken PetNet feeder working again. I wrote did it using ESPHome, and wrote up a blog post about it [1]. The relevance to this situation is that PetNet made a pretty good pet feeder about 5 years ago. It dispensed well, had a good app, and mostly just worked. Then, during 2020, the company just disappeared. The app stopped working, and eventually, the feeders stopped feeding. I tossed mine into the ever-growing box of "I'll get to it later", and forgot about it for a few years. Getting it up and running wasn't tremendously difficult, and now it works almost as well as it did when its new, working significantly better in one critical area: Instead of having to sign into some other random app and fiddle with it there, I can just press a button in HomeAssistant and my cat gets a bunch of food. Maybe later I'll wire in things like the hopper sensors, scales, and other features that the device had, but for now a 1 second pulse of power works well enough There's not really any valid reason PetNet couldn't have just released the firmware flashing keys on the way out. The device likely runs on a microcontroller very similar to ESP32/ESP8622, and so had those keys been available, I could have used the "native" hardware. I suspect the overwhelming majority of these feeders wound up in landfills, as very few people, even the technically competent, are willing to take it apart, solder in a new control board, and get said board up and running. Which is an absolute shame. [1]: https://pdx.su/blog/2024-01-19-fixing-a-broken-smart-cat-feeder-with-esp32/ https://pdx.su/blog/2024-01-19-fixing-a-broken-smart-cat-fee...