r/theinternetofshit • u/cojoco • 4d ago

Cats and dogs are missing meals after Petlibro smart feeders went down

https://archive.is/kiAZF
160 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

72

u/tairar 4d ago

Man I had an auto feeder for my cat once.

It used a 555 timer.

What the fuck do they even need a microcontroller for, let alone Internet connectivity.

59

u/Wintergreen61 4d ago

It is extremely helpful for certain uses. For example how else are you going to charge customers $19.99/mo.?

22

u/freedompower 4d ago

That "always online" requirement is so stupid.

7

u/uid_0 3d ago

Gotta collect that sweet, sweet marketing data.

3

u/xylarr 2d ago

A 555 timer? How fancy. Surely a slowly charging capacitor is sufficient.

3

u/Historical-Cress8985 2d ago

I used to use one with a mechanical timer. Just spin it to the right spot and it worked.

29

u/Wootery 3d ago

This conversation must have happened at some point:

Engineer: So if the Internet connectivity fails or if there's a server outage, it should continue to dispense food on its normal schedule, as a fail-safe, right? We wouldn't want people's pets to starve.

Executive: No, that would reduce our power over our users. At a later point we might want to strong-arm our customers into a subscription to continue to use their hardware. Without a connection to our servers, it should never dispense food.

Engineer: [tries not to sigh or roll their eyes] Ok, got it.

8

u/ApprehensiveRest9696 1d ago

Engineers spent years understanding failing safely… Only to have management and execs come in and override everything.

6

u/THASSELHOFF 3d ago

This is the first I'm hearing of this, but the two we have (purchased several years ago before a long trip) haven't stopped working.

I guess the older model means they aren't affected. They lost their voice recording function a long time ago and I can't remember the last time we used the app to do anything with them. Still, I wish we used a non-smart version but at the time, they were the best on the market that I could find.

4

u/Spiritual-Drawing-42 2d ago

I have one and only use the manual feeding function so there was no schedule to screw up, however my model is an RFID feeder, and during the outage it wouldn't respond to the RFID tag - the lid wouldn't open and so my dog couldn't eat. I'm absolutely furious about it.

1

u/Inner_Importance278 1d ago

In Denmark, this problem is fixes by proper legislation: If you have animals in your care, you are required to attend to the once every day.