Petnet Pet Feeder

Anyone try to get this working yet?

It’s Wi-Fi, but I don’t see an API documented anywhere. Have you asked them if they have an API?

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I reached out to the Petnet people and here is their response:

“This sounds like something that we may explore sometime in the future but no time soon. smile emoticon.”

I love my Petnet, so hopefully we will see something in the future!

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Anyone have any luck integrating this? New puppy on the way, and would love to build this in!

no luck, but defiantly love this pet feed, actually bought two! they have incredible customer service too.

I stumbled here while bored and wondering if I could get the two systems to work together. In short: not gonna happen.

I’ve interacted with Petnet support on a few occasions. In general, they’ve always “done the right thing” to keep customers happy despite absolutely stupid product decisions, management, and vision. I’m in startup tech and these guys are screwed - they either have bad advisor, visionless executives, or both. They’ve festered for years with almost no meaningful software advancement when that seems to be the obvious low hanging fruit to continue hockeystick growth (they seem to focus on seriously dumb hardware stuff). My prediction is they unfortunately go out of business, which is a huge bummer since I love the core product and have been an owner since ~2014 (not quite the kickstarter - I hadn’t heard about it), and I’ve easily caused ~20 purchases by evangelizing to my friends… I know… it’s weird how much I trash their ridiculously stupid business practices while I still recommend them as a scrappy startup with a good hardware solution.

I’ve literally asked support that they please FOSS their platform if they ever go out of business (no reply… but to be fair how should a support tech respond to that?). Anyway, a hardware device reset along with careful SSL-compliant proxy and/or vlan tags+sniffing should reveal enough unofficial ways to interact with the devices. Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now or I’d do that myself.

If anyone ever makes a DTH and Smart App I’ll happily help however I can, of course.

I think it would be easier just to hotwire the physical actuators (ie, replace the computing guys with wifi Arduino etc).

It is actually on my list to take a unit apart and see what is in there, however, this is almost certainly not going to work very well as the core system is a series of digital sensors and stepper motors. I’m not sure if you’ve worked with stepper motors before but they are significantly more complex than “juice the wire with power!” devices (unfortunately). If I ever get around to really looking at things I promise to post more info somewhere :slight_smile:

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has anyone done any work on these lately? and chance or integrating them into ST? I just ordered mine so my cats leave me alone at dinner time. would love to have some integration, I like to run everything through ST

Yesterday I investigated this device a bit.

They are using TLS encryption so it is not that easy to reverse engineer. The remote end seems to be api51.petnet.io and they are using heroku.

I also disassembled the hardware and the product is based on the electric imp platform. And they seems to be very security aware: https://github.com/kristate/krackinfo/issues/209

“While the attack poses challenges for some network users, it does not affect the security of Electric Imp devices. The Electric Imp IoT platform was designed from the start to deal with real-world issues such as weak (or non-existent) network encryption, and so our platform treats all network links as untrusted. Instead, we rely on a mutually-authenticated TLS1.2 ECDHE link to secure the traffic between endpoint and cloud, preventing MITM attacks, data snooping and malicious traffic injection.”

Maybe I will find time to dig into this further. But the best solution would be to ask petnet to release an open API.

Bummer…

https://api51.petnet.io/api