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Smart pet feeders stopped feeding pets during a cloud outage

• unsnap_biceps 2mo ago
  I actually refreshed my petlibro feeders and water fountains with a replacement esphome firmware https://github.com/taylorfinnell/petlibro-esphome https://github.com/taylorfinnell/petlibro-esphome Works great and completely local.
• HardwareLust 2mo ago
  Unless I'm missing something, seems kind of short-sighted to not keep a local copy of the schedule just for this very situation? In fact, why would you even design it like this to begin with? It's not like a pet feeding schedule is dynamic data that changes every day. Makes no sense.
  • unsnap_biceps 2mo ago
    when I was poking at the protocol (MQTT plaintext, including the auth) given the esp32 doesn't have a RTC onboard, they would send MQTT packets with the current time and I suspect that they trigger off of those time packets rather then the software time source on the esp32.
    • HardwareLust 2mo ago
      Interesting! Hadn't even considered that.
• Obscurity4340 2mo ago
  Feeder Robot (from makers of Litter Robot) has a simple offline manual mode using just buttons; i believe if you use the app and program a custom schedule it gets retained but the manual mode should be enough unless there are special dietary concerns