- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
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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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
Because they want to steal and sell your data. C’mon, keep up.
Calm down. My question isn’t to me or them. It’s to the average consumer who would buy this who isn’t asking these questions about the products putting their pets at risk
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.
This article says it’s an issue with smart devices. It isn’t. There are issues with them (mostly security), but this isn’t that. This is an issue with making always-online services that have no need for it. There is absolutely zero reason this device should ever connect to the internet. The intranet should have everything it needs. The device should have its own clock (which I’m certain it does, or it wouldn’t operate), and a connection should only be needed to change settings. Maybe it should expose itself to be connected to externally by your app to change settings or check status when you’re away, but it shouldn’t require a connection.
It needs wifi???
Your feeding schedule writes a cron job on their server, which then runs and commands your feeder to operate. Standard pattern.
/jk (I hope)
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)
If you want actually pretty good smart home stuff, and for cheap, go to IKEA. By default they require nothing but being paired to a button/dial/motion sensor that works entirely on a local mesh network (Zigbee, or more recently Matter over Thread) between the devices. You can buy a hub, which again by default is local only - to control the lights using your phone you need to be connected to your own wifi. And if you really want to control them from somewhere else (or use Siri/Google Assistant etc), you have to specifically enable that functionality.
And because they use matter, they work with most of the other matter stuff, and vice versa - I have a bunch of Aqara temp/humidity sensors connected to mine. And you don’t even need an IKEA hub, any Matter hub will work, and there are quite a few of them including stuff like the Google Home Speaker, a 3rd gen Apple TV, and the Apple Home Pod.
Main downside? IKEA electronics aren’t exactly the most reliable things around.
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?
Any cloud connected device that stops functioning when there is a outage is stupid. Its stupid to buy one.
What about a device that can function offline?
Yes. That is what I’m saying.
But that’s what they bought. That’s what was advertised and sold to them.
It was just false advertising.
I’ve bought two cloud connected devices that promised manual control. Only one did. It was the first thing I did was verify it was true by never using the cloud part of it.
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.
Yeah, now imagine how much better (/s) that would be if “the cloud” was looped in to the timer so that any network outage or server outage or successful hack or DoS attack caused your feeder to malf.
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.
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This feels like bad design
Every modern tech product is.
That’s the kind of limitation I have on mine, but that’s because I have a wireless zigbee plug instead of a real timer, but it’s because I can better change schedules. It’s reliable like 95% of the time, which is good enough for normal use, but I’d be pissed if I paid for an AIO unit that required an active connection to work. At least mine is all on my own network, so it’s (usually) my own fault when something goes sideways
My pets got fed through the entire outage. I did not care to get a 100% reliable solution, as it is just a convenience for us. Not something we rely on. Actually relying on 100% on this is a bad idea.
At this point the most annoying part for me has been the wild amount of emails and info about this outage.
It seems very reasonable for owners of this device to expect something as simple as a schedule to work without having to phone home first.
As a software engineer, blows my mind how teams build shit like this
It does work for me at least. So our schedule is stored locally, it seems.
I kind of think that someone who relies on this 100% of the time maybe shouldn’t have a pet. Pets need company and affection. I mean, I’d love to get a dog again but now I’m just working too much and it wouldn’t be fair.
It could be that their work schedule makes it so they’re not home for meal times, but are home for other times
It could be that people happened to be traveling for this and most cats are fine with an occasional day or two home alone.
It could be that some of them are really bad with daily scheduled tasks and need something to help take that load off.
Maybe consider not being super judgemental about how people manage their pets, there’s perfectly reasonable reasons why people might want, or even need, an auto feeder.
I use it to make sure that our pets don’t go hungry for long. So that they don’t eat everything and then have to wait for 6 or 12 hours until the next feeding. So I just feed them every two hours automatically.
Hmm… Maybe they should make people feeders.
Congress feeders. They only get fed when they do the right thing. They’ll all be dead in a week.
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.
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.
