Smart pet feeders stopped feeding pets during a cloud outage

Unless I'm missing something, seems kind of short-sighted to not keep a local copy of the schedule just for this very situation?

In fact, why would you even design it like this to begin with? It's not like a pet feeding schedule is dynamic data that changes every day. Makes no sense.

when I was poking at the protocol (MQTT plaintext, including the auth) given the esp32 doesn't have a RTC onboard, they would send MQTT packets with the current time and I suspect that they trigger off of those time packets rather then the software time source on the esp32.

Interesting! Hadn't even considered that.

Feeder Robot (from makers of Litter Robot) has a simple offline manual mode using just buttons; i believe if you use the app and program a custom schedule it gets retained but the manual mode should be enough unless there are special dietary concerns

I actually refreshed my petlibro feeders and water fountains with a replacement esphome firmware https://github.com/taylorfinnell/petlibro-esphome

Works great and completely local.