First off, the good:
– reasonably sturdy, though our pets do not try to break it and I would absolutely not call it "battle tested".
– it works! our food-stealing cat is perfectly locked out.
– it works! opens reliably, feeds reliably (… so far), zero true issues after a month.
And, honestly, those are all that truly matter. So I I'm keeping the pair.
But I can't believe someone made this product.
And I can't believe it's apparently the only one that does what it does.
This is capitalism failing at its most obvious.
—
Cons. Oh. My. Glob.
There is absolutely no way they use their own product.
It's very, *very* loud, and our dog likes to check that food exists a couple dozen times per night. And it's even louder when it dispenses food.
We'll learn to sleep through it, but WOW. This thing competes equally with the coffee grinder, and it's doing far less work, far more slowly.
I have no idea what motors they are using, but it's very clear they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. From the outside. Through an underground tunnel. Holy crap.
It has the most insane UI I've used in decades. The manual is correct and clear, so it's survivable, but when pairing to a collar tag it looks like it's glitching and you will definitely second guess everything you pressed. And that's *normal* behavior, not a bad unit.
And last but not least, and the most concerning but NOT YET FULLY TESTED: when it hits an error, it keeps erroring. Permanently, as far as I can tell.
When it's in this state, it seems to give up on feeding (if it thinks it's empty or jammed), but it'll still open and close the access door. And… honestly I'm not sure I trust it to try again at the next scheduled time. So far we've been nearby every day and have cleared errors and I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing… so I give it an even 50/50 chance of doing the obviously-right thing and continuing to try each feed period or more.
Behavior has mostly been good despite seriously questionable UX…
…no, not questionable. Inhuman UX. Impossible that a rational being has designed UX. Seriously what
Despite questionable UX, behavior has been reasonable. It stops itself quickly, interrupts itself when the animals interrupt to prefer what they want, and resumes later smoothly. If the feed-error turns out to behave well, I'll have almost nothing but praise for the core behavior.
That "almost" is a kinda important one though: when you do the "force open/closed" or "force dispense" button-combo, it *ignores you* if the paired tag is nearby. So you have to shoo the dog away for a full minute or two to get past a feed error and actually feed the dog.
I… almost understand the logic here. But no, it's dumb. If I want to close the door while they're eating, let me! It has pressure sensors, listen to those *safety* mechanisms but otherwise do what I told you to do, because that's why I told you to do it!
It's quite frustrating. But still worth it. But I still can't believe there aren't massively-better options for half the price, it would be *so incredibly easy* to run this company into the ground and they would deserve it for making roughly zero progress across several years.
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