
Yet another useless gadget...
That loses it's functionality completely as soon as it's connection is down...
Humans have been forced to temporarily interact with their dogs or cats – perhaps both – after PetNet’s internet-controlled smart feeder system suffered a blackout. For $149, the company provides a web-enabled dog/cat feeder that is pre-programmed to dispense food stuffs at certain time and portion sizes. But PetNet warned …
I mean you are just confusing the purpose of the device. It's not there to feed your pet. It's there to generate some data which, given the current hype, might become valuable when combined with other data. Big Data for the win.
It's a closed source device, you are the product not the customer, no matter how much you paid.
There is a reason that some things should be autonomous within your own home and have no external dependencies.
You have to wonder how hard it would have been to design the device to store the feeding pattern locally, rather than rely on a permanent up-link to the mother-ship. I'm thinking PIC / Arduino implementing a weekly clock and a control output to trigger the feeding mechanism.
I wonder who would be liable for any animal cruelty resulting from temporary starvation ?
- Hint, the vendor will have weasel words in their documentation saying its not their fault if anything breaks (like your favourite pet).
"...the vendor will have weasel words in their documentation saying its not their fault if anything breaks (like your favourite pet)."
Yep, from their website:
"You use a Product at your own discretion and risk. You will be solely responsible for (and Petnet disclaims) any and all loss, liability or damages resulting from your use of a Product, including damage or loss to your home, other peripherals connected to the Product, computer, mobile device, and all other items and pets in your home."
Set up a company like "PetNet". Pay off RSCPCA/PETA/whatever. Get lawyers.
Sell your automatic feeder to thousands of gullible morons.
Turn off your servers.
Alert the RSPCA/PETA/whatever to owners that might potentially be cruel to their animals and disclose the customer list.
Wait for lawsuits to start.
Reap profits from lawyer services to whoever pays more (PETA/RSPCA/whatever or your own customers). Provide telemetry data favors the correct party.
Hint, the vendor will have weasel words in their documentation
A large and/or fierce enough dog will have little problem with a weasel, and I know some cats who would manage likewise.
Hungry enough they will be sufficiently motivated to deal with the marketing twonks who deal in weasel words.
No doubt there is a processor of some sorts in there. It's program hasn't been designed well. personally I'd have it keep the schedule locally but allow remote updates and a time sync service in case the power goes off. Oh and a motion activated so the internets can see which of the neighbours cats is in your kitchen.
There is a reason that some things should be autonomous within your own home and have no external dependencies.
My cat is already autonomous within our home. He has extensive and redundant overlapping notification systems to alert us to his various needs. For example, if his audible "I want food" alarm is not acknowledged within the desired time frame, he escalates to leg clawing. No internet connection required.
"the problem is that the notification system works only in local environment, with a roaming owner it is ineffective"
Roaming owners are a temporary state of affairs, they cannot roam indefinitely, cats know this. Hence why they keep their claws sharpened on various pieces of furniture/fence panels/trees etc.
Whilst I have used this Pratchett quote before, still relevant:
"Cats will amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw."
If it does not exist already I assume Amazon is working on a cat operated Amazon Dash Button so the they can order more food. Or maybe they will train Alexa to recognize an "I am hungry" meow.
Once we are all gone, all that may be left are our self maintaining machines and the cats they serve.
They've had auto-feeders for years for pets. (Yeah.. farms have had them also). And this long before IoT or even the internet. Why buy and then keep paying? If your WAN connection goes down... doggie dies.
One of the fun things about having a pet is feeding time....
" . . to add an offline function."
Of course, the whole problem here was caused by the accidental addition of an offline function...
"Let me guess: Manglement pooh-poohed it, as they couldn't offer "pet-feeding as a service" if you could set the timer and let it run by itself."
The really sad part is that there are numerous feeders that already do exactly that, and are available for far less than $150. As with so many IoT things, this isn't so much a solution in search of a problem as it is screwing up the solution we already had.
How reliable is it? If people are only using it to feed animals during a single day, not such a problem.
I'm not going to comment on people who keep social animals like dogs and then leave them at home alone all day, except to remark that a Raspberry Pi has more empathy and common sense.
A excellent point - we've got such a device that stores it's configuration on board (not an IOT device) - it's only suitable for supervised use, ie., we need to keep a eye on it to make sure it feeds out the amount the cat is supposed to have each day and manually adjust the amount with a little scoop as required.
Cat food has a tendency to clump, especially in winter, and we get all the issues of tunneling and arching experienced in any large silo - just ours is in miniature.
Given the somewhat dodgy consistency of performance I would not buy such a device again.
If we're away overnight the cat gets a decent sized all-you-can-eat self-serve buffet - clean water is always available in quantity, although it appears the water left in the bottom of the shower tastes better.
What will happen when the cloud fails to remind me that I've left a kid in a hot car?
Some people shouldn't be allowed to raise hamsters, let alone cats, dogs or kids.
IIRC this was a plot device in one of Larry Niven's stories about warlike alien felines he called Kzin. The Kzin leader is assassinated by human hackers who inactivate the leader's home kit-feeding mechanism. When he returns home, he is attacked and devoured by his own starving kits.
Perhaps PetNet owners should exercise caution in opening their front doors?
A similar idea appeared in Ray Bradbury's "And the Moon be Still as Bright", from The Martian Chronicles. In that story an automatic house survives a nuclear war that killed its owners. The pet food dispenser continues to work, but the door to the kitchen is jammed, so even though there is plenty of food the dog starves to death. Then the house catches fire and burns down. I think it was a metaphor.
In any case the lesson is that you shouldn't rely on home automation to keep a house running in the event of a nuclear war. And you should always consider the whole system when designing an automatic mechanism, not just the mechanism itself.
"How many birds are killed by motor vehicles. I bet it's ten times the number killed by cats. Where's the outrage over that?"
Well, the RSPB estimates approx. 55 million birds killed by cats every year, though they do say it is not much of a problem.
I don't know the number killed by cars, but I do know that in the last 20 years about 1 bird has got killed by my car. Assuming I'm not too far off average and that there are around 35 million vehicles on the road, that would suggest somewhere around 2 million birds per year. Even if I am a whole order of magnitude below average, that's still only around 20 million a year, way off your claim of 550 million.
This is not an anti-cat post, this is an "extraordinary claims require some sort of proof" post.
Many fewer than are killed by cats and, in any event, car drivers don't set out to kill birds and most will try and avoid them. Cats methodically set out to hunt them down. Note, it's not the cat's fault. It's humans for keeping them in massively larger numbers than could be supported in the wild.
Soon after I learnt to drive, I hit a pheasant. I pulled over to see if it was alright, and glad to see that it was only stunned. After a few minutes it flow off across the road - and was hit by another car coming in the opposite direction!
For balance - on another occasion, hit a cat as well. Did the decent thing and pulled over to look for it. Five minutes later, came to the realisation that I'm looking for a black cat at night....
Over the last 30 years or so behind the wheel I've managed to hit a few of our feathered friends. Though probably few enough to count on the digits of one hand.
I am, however, one of what I suspect is a pretty small group of people who have managed to run over a squirrel whilst riding a pushbike (me on the bike, not the squirrel, obviously) ...
Our cat doesn't work in three dimensions. He'll pretty much ignore birds frolicking in front of him because he knows birds have an UP option and that's hard.
Rodents, on the other hand, are fair game and he'll hunt them for fun. This, we encourage. The only good mouse is a dead one (that applies equally to the cartoon mouse).
Hit a wild turkey the other day - I'm pretty sure it tried to take me out in a murder-suicide effort.
I was doing about 50mph up in the mountains and watched this large bird *turn around* as it was walking *off* the road and launch itself literally at my face. However, this wild turkey vastly underestimated the strength of my windshield in it's murder-suicide attempt and went *poof* HARD on the glass, I ducked (?lmao) out of sheer 'IT'S COMING RIGHT FOR ME' response and saw a bunch of feathers in my rear view mirror behind me, not sure where it landed. Half expected to find it in the bed of my truck. Nope.
**the one with bloody feathers all over the damn thing...
I've only hit a bird once in all my years of driving -- and it was a large white goose that tried crossing over the road from one pond to another. It went under my 1-ton van and thew a cloud of feathers behind me that looked like someone had opened a down pillow and emptied it out the window, causing almost white-out conditions. Luckily nobody was right behind me, as the road curved as it went between the two ponds...
When I had a cat, it would bring me a present of wild poultry about once a week.
How many birds you kill in your car depends on the speed of travel. There's a section of Nebraska that's lightly populated (less than one person per square mile) that I travel each year. On a highway north of North Platte I travel at 90-110 mph for about a 50 minute trip, and there are these birds that are always sitting on the highway pecking at stuff. Not sure what, maybe seeds blowing from the grass on either side - this is cattle country so there are no crops.
I probably kill a dozen each way. Going the speed limit most of them probably get out of the way, though some are stupid and will fly out of the way and then double back into the path of the car, even at 60 mph they'd be toast.
Used to drive a triumph spitfire, along narrow south of England sunken roads through woods.
Had a line of pheasants painted on the side with crosses through them....
I'm probably not a representative sample though. Most driving is done on motorways and birds tend not to fly low over them.
I've only hit a bird once in all my years of driving
Me too, and it was only a second-hand kill. It was a pheasant that was hit by an oncoming van, bouncing off its windshield, and landing right in the path of my front wheel, which duly squished it into a quantity of pheasant pate (augmented with crunchy bits) plus a cloud of feathers.
I was once driving in north central Missouri through a heavy rainstorm shortly after dark, and on this one winding ~10 mile section of county road there were uncounted thousands tiny frogs hopping around on the road, at least 2 or 3 per square foot. So many that I had to slow down because I was powersliding around the curves on their guts!
Never seen anything like that before or since.
But ...this screws up quantum physics - What would Schrodinger say.
Only he's allowed to kill the cat.
I'm thinking about the IoT equivalent of that analogy - a non-resilient web enabled service that might light the match in the box if the web services call was correctly formatted.
Perhaps we need to update the analogy by introducing Faraday to Schrodinger - so that the box is now RF shielded as well.
The big complications with cats come where they are pretty recent introductions, such as New Zealand. Here in England it's a bit late to do anything, and, anyway, our wildlife mix isn't that old. We had something called an Ice Age. The New Zealand glaciers were never quite so overwhelming.
So there are some unique species in New Zealand, while the UK is similar to the rest of Europe.
Free-roaming non-fed cats eat vermin as their primary food source. The well-fed housecats that roam our streets kill for amusement and boredom, and mostly leave the carcass to rot. That dead animal on the mat you imagine kitty left you as a gift? It simply abandoned its toy when it stopped working.
"Darwin in action. Eventually the only birds left will be the ones smart enough to avoid cats."
Or the ones that evolve to eat them. Human feeding creates an excess population of top predators - eventually something will evolve to make use of this food supply.
My guess would be buzzards that learn to launch air to ground rocks.
"I need one of these devices so I can ensure my teenage son gets fed. At present he's going through one of those teenage nocturnal gaming periods of life and is never awake at normal eating times"
What about the hitch hikers you have locked up in your dungeon, you could get one for them as well.
If you have to rely on the Internet to feed your pet, you shouldn't have a pet. Sadly, there's a lot of owners who are merely owners and not a bud with their pet. It's a possession that they haven't a clue about.
One of the pure joys in life is when I feed our dog. You'd think she won the lottery or something. And when she's done, she comes and lays on my feet or asks to sit on my lap.
Enough processing to sync to a remote server, but not enough to have a clue when the remote part isn't working.
For the price they want for this junk, I'd expect an autonomous mode, plus internal battery in case of power failure as well as net failure, and depending on design, maybe battery operation so it can still do is job in the total absence of anything.
It isn't hard, you know. This isn't some stupid doll that will spy on your kid for the half hour it takes them to get bored of it. It is a device that people will be trusting to provide food to their pet - a living creature. Forget the fancy disclaimers. Any pet feeder that is unable to do its task for such arbitrary reasons as "loss of website" is a piece of shit. Nothing more.
You also might want a pre-packaged engineer, incase you have a mechanical failure of any part of a jam in the feeding mechanism.
Perhaps you should just get 2 or 3 units and a spare UPS, so you have all bases covered.
People stupid enough to use such systems and not have a backup, should not be allowed to have pets or children for that matter
There should actually be at least three failsafes:
1. Locally stored schedule (with an RTC) that continues to dispense food in the event that remote sync isn't working.
2. Battery backup.
3. A separate trapdoor mechanism that opens to release all remaining food if the main mechanism fails or becomes stuck, or if battery is low/critically low.
Sadly, that's pretty much how it works for many (most?) old folks these days. Fed, watered, washed, etc. by nameless, faceless drones running off a script.
Yes, I know, there ARE care facilities for the elderly that are staffed by humans who actually care about their charges. But try to find one in a hurry after an elderly relative suffers a massive stroke ...
I used to work as an agency carer in nursing homes.
While there are nice people, there are also some truly awful people who seem to get off on abusing those who are unable to respond. Being senile doesn't mean one no longer feels pain. Then you get those carers who seem to think that everybody is senile, so puts a perfectly cognisant person on the commode with instructions like "up handies". There are many ways to be disabled that don't affect brain functions.
A procession of "trained" staff who seem to exist purely to question each other's medical reports and drug doses, so a lady with a morphine pump has to suffer in silence because somebody who never met her before looks at the dose and says "nah, that can't be right", so us regulars at the place try to say "yeah it's right" and "phone the manager" but hey, what do we know? She's the "trained" one and we're just the fucking "agency".
Then there is the management. Spreadsheet wranglers. Their job is to match rooms with IDs, as if it's just bringing a cargo ship into berth. I get that this is a business and people should have to pay, but some of the way this is handled is horrible. State medical cover refusing to pay the artifically jacked up prices? Okay, take number four to lunch and when she's gone move her stuff into the broom cupboard...
And when somebody has a fit, pisses themselves and is choking on vomit, we'll all discover the staff generally don't know what to do and the people that are supposed to be in charge are busy risk assessing to determine whether or not they are "allowed" to call for an ambulance.
The tldr version: I'd rather die alone and be eaten by my cat than go spend my final years in a nursing home.
One hell of a lot unfortunately....Going by the mostly shallow corporate responses to the NTIA survey here:
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/federal-register-notice/2016/comments-potential-roles-government-fostering-advancement-internet-of-things
>> If you have to rely on the Internet to feed your pet, you shouldn't have a pet.
I agree in general.
And if I go away for a few days I'll arrange someone to come feel the cat.
But if I'm away overnight or maybe a weekend occasionally, it's possible to leave enough food for the cat but *better* if it's not available to him all at once.
That doesn't require an internet connected device though, just a timer :)
Because of my dodgy health, I doubt I shall start keeping another animal, with or without the emergency cover something such as this could provide. And this particular approach, depended on the continuing Internet connection to a server, is just plain stupid design. Automatic feeder systems have been used in farming for over thirty years, part of stand-alone, computer-controlled systems that support human management.
A typical example was in dairy farming, where the cattle wore an identity tag collar, the system could record an individual cow's milk yield, and the feeding could be matched to that.
You'd have to be an idiot to rely on an unsupervised fully automatic system, and doubly an idiot for something like this with a off-site server. Robot milking systems exist, and allow more flexible timing that can better suit the cattle, but they can't do everything, and skilled human staff aren't going away any time soon.
If a device requires a cloud to function, and I can't deploy my own server to replace that cloud, then I'm not buying it no matter how many fela^W cooked breakfasts I get from it.
I mean: I'm fine with requiring a central server to achieve magic, but I want the option to deploy my own with ease.
Or perhaps you could feed your pets yourself?
Seriously, that's the deal. You get joy from having the furry creatures around and in return you feed them / cater to their every whim. (dog / cat obvs)
Its the only time I see one of my cats, if she didn't need me to feed it I'd never see her! I'd certainly hear her though... snores like train only louder!
If only there were a way of operating the pet feeder using an on-device timer whose settings could be altered when needed by internet connection, yet that would function perfectly in the absence of internet connectivity.
But no such internet connected automatic timing device has ever been invented in the history of the world.
Alas, Mr Whiskers. It seems you must starve.