Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed
5 days ago by new_otters_raft to c/technology
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).
They can’t charge a subscription for an internal clock
Or push ads, or gather data on users.
An app is always a red flag, especially if it's the only way you can interact with the 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
The ability to play with it, without having to fiddle with tiny switches is a big feature to many. Often these are used by people with mobility issues. The ability to add an extra feed, due to exercise, or adjust the timings to account for changes in life plans are a godsend to many.
Smart home devices are a balancing act. The extra control means more can also go wrong. Minimising that is a big part. The most critical is making it behave sanely when it suddenly goes offline. E.g. smart light switches become dumb ones, when the central hub goes down.
OK, add a simple remote control with buttons for adjusting the schedule and triggering a manual feed. No need for that to be any more complicated than a TV remote from the 90s. Keep it offline, no problem.
To each their own. I prefer having the ability to adjust things from 1 central source. I'm prone to losing remotes.
Also, how would you do such a remote. You would also need a screen for feedback etc, which puts you back at square 1.
Also, a remote would be considerably more expensive than the extra cost of a ZigBee/Wifi enabled microcontroller.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't dispense 2 upvotes (one for the comment one for the cat pic) so just get this comment
He'll lie down between my arms and rest his head on my lower arm while my hands are on the keyboard. Good touch typing practice, as I can't see the keys.
May be an orange, but you sure have a smart system to alert you if the kibble is late.
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.
Home Assistant, my beloved.
Spread your knowledge, but most are not motivated or equipped
But people no longer have computers at home. More and more rely on just phones or can’t even use anything else.
Fun fact, companies want every piece of data you’re willing to give them, including your pets. Not to mention that the average person doesn’t realize the risk of connecting a device to the internet.
Because they want to steal and sell your data. C'mon, keep up.
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.
Then the process should happen on the phone locally and not by connecting to their servers which run the processes and then send commands back to the device through your phone...
But then they cant turn off the servers in 18 months, forcing you to buy a new one?!
Monthly recurring revenue perhaps? I can’t be bothered to find out of this is a subscription but I bet it is.
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...
They totally can. We used to have a super low tech one. It was like an old cookie timer. You crank a wheel over to the number of hours you wanted (so it only worked over a day or so)and a spring inside just turned the crank back until a little hole lined up with a notch allowing the door to open. There were two bins inside one device, so two feedings. No batteries. No Internet.
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.
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.
It needs wifi????
Your feeding schedule writes a cron job on their server, which then runs and commands your feeder to operate. Standard pattern.
/jk (I hope)
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.
Its cheaper.
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)
If you want actually pretty good smart home stuff, and for cheap, go to IKEA. By default they require nothing but being paired to a button/dial/motion sensor that works entirely on a local mesh network (Zigbee, or more recently Matter over Thread) between the devices. You can buy a hub, which again by default is local only - to control the lights using your phone you need to be connected to your own wifi. And if you really want to control them from somewhere else (or use Siri/Google Assistant etc), you have to specifically enable that functionality.
And because they use matter, they work with most of the other matter stuff, and vice versa - I have a bunch of Aqara temp/humidity sensors connected to mine. And you don't even need an IKEA hub, any Matter hub will work, and there are quite a few of them including stuff like the Google Home Speaker, a 3rd gen Apple TV, and the Apple Home Pod.
Main downside? IKEA electronics aren't exactly the most reliable things around.
“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….”
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)
So is it poor design or cases where users didn't put batteries in?
Any cloud connected device that stops functioning when there is a outage is stupid. Its stupid to buy one.
What about a device that can function offline?
Yes. That is what I'm saying.
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.
True. One can only innovate so much in a particular product. So, every company irrespective of requirement is putting "AI" into their products just to make investors happy which in turn screws cust experience in a lot of cases. The best example is AI customer service desk. Oh god! It's rare these days to get human support. Seems like every company has onboarded AI support system
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.
I have a Petlibro, but one of the old ones that has no cloud connection and no app. You just program it on the feeders interface itself. From a mechanical standpoint they are pretty awesome and feeding the proper amount of food is so much easier than doing it manually.
Yeah, now imagine how much better (/s) that would be if "the cloud" was looped in to the timer so that any network outage or server outage or successful hack or DoS attack caused your feeder to malf.
Its not hard to just put some food in a bowl. Not every damn thing needs automation.
There are situations in which this device helps a lot:
- Portion control
- Preventing other cats from stealing food
- Keeping the kibbles dry with silica gel packs
- Automating food when the owner is away for some days
God forbid the user have to push a button on the device itself.
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.
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
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.
This article says it's an issue with smart devices. It isn't. There are issues with them (mostly security), but this isn't that. This is an issue with making always-online services that have no need for it. There is absolutely zero reason this device should ever connect to the internet. The intranet should have everything it needs. The device should have its own clock (which I'm certain it does, or it wouldn't operate), and a connection should only be needed to change settings. Maybe it should expose itself to be connected to externally by your app to change settings or check status when you're away, but it shouldn't require a connection.
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.
It seems very reasonable for owners of this device to expect something as simple as a schedule to work without having to phone home first.
As a software engineer, blows my mind how teams build shit like this
It does work for me at least. So our schedule is stored locally, it seems.
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.
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.
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.
Cats greed-stuffing until they barf. My orange one killed a roomba that way.
No, the Roomba had the appetite. On the wrong thing.
Edit: now i'm imagining Garfield jump-attacking the XKCD roomba.
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.
Especially if you're away from home
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.
Nah, some are just wired like this.
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.
Some cats are fucked in the head. Don't ever get a Bengal.
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.
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!
Congress feeders. They only get fed when they do the right thing. They'll all be dead in a week.
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.
There won't be an outage next time. Next time just pay for the all new subscription, 99.99% uptime!
/s
I fucking hate the current state of technology.
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.
That's the kind of limitation I have on mine, but that's because I have a wireless zigbee plug instead of a real timer, but it's because I can better change schedules. It's reliable like 95% of the time, which is good enough for normal use, but I'd be pissed if I paid for an AIO unit that required an active connection to work. At least mine is all on my own network, so it's (usually) my own fault when something goes sideways
Stupid
They almost died because you are a shitty owner
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Okay
Makes sense
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.
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