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Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed
(arstechnica.com)
It needs wifi????
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.
wtf why is it requiring wifi for a mechanism that should simply just rely on electricity if nothing else?
This is reminding me of the copypasta where the it admin keeps a gun next to the printer.
Also my automatic pet feeder is dumb and only runs on electric
Stupid
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.
They save money by offloading the processing to your phone.
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...
I ain't arguing it's a good setup. Somewhere there's a spreadsheet showing how many dead pets they can get away with before their cost-saving strategy goes into the red.
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)
Hmm... Maybe they should make people feeders.
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.
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?
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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.
Why can't these schedules be held locally in the device memory.
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.
But then they cant turn off the servers in 18 months, forcing you to buy a new one?!
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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.
This feels like bad design
Every modern tech product is.
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.
May be an orange, but you sure have a smart system to alert you if the kibble is late.
I bet Nemo loves to sit on your keyboard when you're trying to type.
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.
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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