seriously, there’s not much to 'em. i’d be surprised. if there was, it would definitely be a surprise.
it’s not, though – at least not on the first-gen model i have. there’s a button you can press that releases food too.
i’m trying to wean our cats from the dry and more towards wet, on our vet’s advice. the wet food is better for them – more protein, less fillers, in her words.
We’re looking to get feeders that trigger off of the RFID microchips already in our 3 kitties to help them portion food:
https://www.amazon.com/SureFlap-MPF001-Surefeed-Microchip-Feeder/dp/B00O0UIPTY
One of our cats is a porkchop and will happily go around eating the others’ portions, and these things will only open for the kitty in question.
The good news is, while they do have connected versions, their plain old cyborg-detecting model is not, and it is cheaper. I can’t see any reason whatsoever why I would need a push notification when my kitty is eating otherwise. 
Standard Hackaday joke is that some project could be replaced with a bunch of 555 chips. Literally true in this case.
YouTube couple Rachel and Jun have/had one of these rfid things. They had a few issues. Let me see if my half awake brain can find it. It is one of these channels I don’t follow but YouTube rotated in every once and a while.
Edit:
These pets need to develop more coping skills
Great video, glad it ultimately worked. Hopefully, our fluffball won’t be quite so persistent 
Don’t know about that, seems to be Boeing’s motto these days.
I like the idea of these. I tried them, and they were sadly a massive failure for our use case. It didn’t reliably read the chip for one of our cats because it has migrated from the base of her neck down to her midsection. Also one of our cats is very skittish and wouldn’t go near the scary moving noise making thing, food or no.
IOT. The leading “I” and “D” are silent.
Yeah it seems like and engineer creating a much bigger problem in their attempt to fix a minor problem for sure. I feel bad for the pets whose owners might have been out of town and hadn’t discovered the problem until their return especially since there’s isn’t a camera. At least if it had a cam you could have asked your neighbor to check in on the pet, but as we all know humans have a bad tendency to rely too heavily on tech and tech is often a big let down (ex Tesla auto pilot).
The vacuum has it covered!
If it allowed online activation pirates would be able to more easily break the Dog Rights Management technology; and then where would we be?
(More plausibly, some coder bro who probably has ‘engineer’ somewhere in his title but not in his psyche was more comfortable handling timekeeping with some cloud API than braving the terrifying waters of something that doesn’t speak HTTP with a DS1307 or something; so the system may or may not even be capable of local timekeeping beyond whatever the OS provided with the BSP does out of the box…)
Obviously the timer needs to be synched to an atomic clock online. Can you imagine it suddenly being Aprilber 35th 1855 and the software not knowing about it, the rootin’tootin that would ensue!
No. Even if it weren’t a “smart” feeder a simple timer would have done a better job, but there are plenty of chips that could so the same thing without other smart features and especially if it had a pi chip or similar embedded it definitely doesn’t have to be connected. This is a case of really bad engineering.
This is misleading and wrong. This product doesn’t have to be connected to the internet (or even plugged in) to function so I don’t know how this could have “starved” pets. Boing boing, please check the info. It only needs the cloud to use the app your phone. But the product just dispenses food based on a clock.
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