Feeding the cats.... or how I got my sleep back.

 

I've just started a new job with Jaguar Land Rover, the manufacturer not a retailer, and we are staying with friends. Thus they have been getting their house automated bit by bit, and it has been the subject of my last few posts.

We have our cats with us and, when we lived in the USA, they were just fine about being fed twice a day by our automated pet feeder, which was by Hoison. For some reason, one of the cats has decided to start waking us up at 3am by being very noisy... which would mean we'd have to traipse down stairs in the middle of the night to feed him, and often the other one too.

This was driving me nuts as it was seriously interrupting my sleep and making me extremely tired, which would not be good for a new job.

We loved the Hoison pet feeder, but it just doesn't seem to be available any more. also, whilst it was possible to run with a mobile app, there was no integration with HomeKit. Now, admittedly, there is no product with native HomeKit integration.... so, once more, homebridge is to the rescue.

Enter the PetSafe Smart Feed. Fortunately, there is a plugin homebridge-petsafe-smart-feed. Now, this doesn't do a lot really. The plugin creates a switch in HomeKit that causes a feed in multiples of 1/8th of a cup. Still, it's really easy to set up, and it means that if the little darling does wake us up, it's a quick word with Siri to "Feed the cat", and back to sleep as twinkle toes thumps his way down the stairs!

Installation is really easy, via the homebridge ui.

Then there is set up, and the setup helps you generate a token, so no storing of passwords. Great! You can leave it at that if you want, and then the feeder will just copy the last feed.

You can, though, select the feeder, and you can have more than one, and define how many 1/8th of a cup you want. That's it! We now have HomeKitty! (Sorry, too good to ignore)

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Creating the scene is not exactly involved either.

The Cat feeder is in the "Front Room", so I went there and pressed the "+" at the top of the screen and created a new scene.