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Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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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).

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[–] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

We got one so we could go on vacation while owning a cat who would 100% eat all the food he could fit, vomit, and then keep eating.
With the auto feeder we just had someone stop by once a day for litter and such.

Definitely not networked though. That just seems like bad design purely from a "building a feeder" side. Why would you want to manage servers to coordinate pet feeding? At most an app that can set the timers, but it's not so hard to offload that actual tracking to the device.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    vomit, and then keep eating.

    Maybe we've been lucky, but we've never had that problem.

    Definitely not networked though. That just seems like bad design

    Indeed, automatic feeders have existed long before we even had Internet.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, he was the runt of the litter we think, and abandoned by his mother. We pulled him out from under a neighbor's porch and got him through it, but he always has a bit of a frantic urgency around food time, even for a cat. Our other cat was 100% good with one of those gravity feeders and would just graze over the course of the day and keep himself at a good weight.

    We've kept the auto feeder around so the one can get five or six smaller meals throughout the day, since he eats so fast a normal portion often causes issues.

    It's basically a dumb alarm clock that drops food in tablespoon increments. Only features I wish it had that it doesn't is an "I'm nearly empty" sensor that could flash a light, and the ability to sync it's clock with the radio broadcast time signal, since it drifts waaay more than you would expect and we need to reset the clock every month.

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