Background

Our automated pet feeder, the PetNet SmartFeeder 2.0, has begun to feed the cat at what seems to be large and inconsistent offsets from the scheduled feed times.

Goal

The hardware of the PetNet itself is fairly nice so the goal here is to replace the entire control board with my own system.

Status

2/1/2020

I understand how the feeder works now and I just about know what each pin on the board is doing. I just need some more time with a DMM and an oscilloscope to nail down a few more specifications.

I may further disassemble the feeder to get a better look at the motor, motor board, encoder and LEDs but it's not required to start replacing the board.

Existing waveform recordings from an oscilloscope still need to be organized and added to this document.

2/3/2020

The feeder has miraculously returned to feeding our cat on time. I doubt this will deter me from continuing on.

2/13/2020

PetNet is having another system outage. All the more reason to actually finish this project.

Components

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/6306118b-050d-44de-8d60-0dfa7009d12f/IMG_0762.jpeg

Board

The board looks to be a custom design from PetNet. That being said, it does seem to report as some kind of Qualcomm IoT board.

The board gets power from a 5V 1A Micro-USB power supply. There is a 3-pin switch on the back of the unit that's connected to the board. I'm not yet sure why the switch has three pins.

Battery

Along with the power being delivered from Micro-USB, the PetNet also has a battery. The battery is likely a 3.7V Lithium-Polymer unit.