Debugger
The Internet of Things Almost Starved My Cat
And other perils of the digital age
A smart pet feeder is a great idea in theory: It can be controlled from your phone, making it simple to schedule feedings and giving you the ability to feed your cat or dog from anywhere in the world.
Except, it turns out, if the device manufacturer’s servers aren’t online. My own smart pet feeder’s maker, Petnet, has struggled with reliability for years — leaving my cat, Mika, hungry on a number of occasions — and if the company were to go out of business, my cat feeder would turn into a very expensive paperweight.
Over a long weekend in February, that’s exactly what happened. An unspecified service outage crippled pet feeders for more than a week, leaving Mika without food when we were out of town.
Mika was rescued by a friend who went over to feed him, but the incident left me wondering how long Petnet would continue to operate the feeder’s service at all and why it depends on a server working to perform basic functionality. The…
