HomeRunPet Smart Feeder Automatic Food Dispenser 5-Meals Timer for Cats and Dogs, 5L Storage

7/30/19Just starting out with this machine. I will update this review as I gain experience with it.The machine is simple and clean. It uses a usb 5v to barrel connector for the plug. It’s about 5 ft long and is prob too short for my location.The tray is held in place with a magnet. Seems simple but effective. Might place a bigger magnet in the future if it looses its strength. The tray is pushed out with a tab and is on a linear screw track similar to a disk drive. Seems strong enough but super slow. Prob takes a min to a min and a half to fully slide out. I’m sure it’ll be a pain to test the food dispensing amount.I’m using the apple app. It is untested and very buggie at best. It showed different buttons than this machine, so I had to use the manual to get started.There was no bar code in the back of the machine, the app and manual led me to believe there would be one. Signing up with email was difficult because there was no confirmation that it worked. After verifying the email it did let me sign in.After successfully signing into the app and trying to add my dog the app would quit every time I tried to select in the breed section. The app would then restart with none of the information I had previously entered.- I got around this by adding a cat first then changing the data for my dog. Silly that is what would let it work.The app asks for measurements in kg not cups or lbs. I’m in America and so use imperial measurements. There’s no where to set unit preference.Very poor start to this machine. Going to finish setting it up and see how the rest of the experience pans out.Update: 8/1/19After every change to the app a confirmation prompt appears. It’s really annoying.No way to delete food dispenses from schedule. While I was testing out the measurement quantities using the treat settings, it was adding these to my dogs feeding amount.Only 5 schedule settings. I use each setting to dispense a little of his food at a time, so he doesn’t eat it all real quickly. With only 5 settings I can only break up two feedings twice and a third at full. This is really disappointing, almost to the point where I will return this. I can’t fit a slow feed bowl in the tray so if I am going to continue using this machine for dispensing food I need to be able to add a few feedings to each schedule. Max of 18 would be fine for my use case, (3 feedings per meal 3x a day and separate schedules for weekends than weekdays) not sure about others needs though.Update 8/10/19The schedule issue was too much for me. My dog eats so fast he gets the hiccups even when I break the food down into two feedings per meal. I reached out to support and they were really motivated to assist. Unfortunately they were not able to make any changes to the app, so I will be returning this machine. They understood and have issued me a prepaid label.As a last ditch effort I tried using the manual feed settings since I usually watch my pup eat anyways but got overwhelmed by the dinging noise. It happens twice in a row and then repeats FOUR times!! So when I feed him three different times I hear the dinging 24 times!!!!! I remember reading one persons review saying something about it and not paying it too much attention but holy crap that is annoying. There’s no way to turn that off in the app either and if I cut the speaker wire then I don’t hear any speaking at all.Good hardware but crappy software and not convenient to use at all. Shame since this had the rechargeable batteries instead of the D cell too!Update 8/16/19I was able to voice record nothing for a second and that takes over the dinner bell that repeats a lot. Now I can slow feed in 20-25g increments a couple times a day and that has worked well enough for me!I compared with the petsafe model (2nd gen) and was extremely impressed with the customer support lady that answered my questions. It has a slow feed option but simply breaks up the food into 1/8 cups and dispersed over 15 min. The time between feedings isn’t changeable. It also can fit a slow feed bowl in the dish. It has D cell batteries for back up which I am completely opposed to and is $190, so about twice this cost.Overall the feature set of this feeder and price are good, and now that I can remove that stupid dinner bell, I will live with the buggy software for the most part anyways. I measured out my food weight to convert to grams since this doesn’t have a local conversion setting and was off quite a bit at lower amounts. The 70g only dispersed 50g. A little hesitant he’s getting his full 2 cups a day but he looks good so far.Update 8/19/19Two more bugsWhen using the reward feature to manually feed, If I go check the amount dispersed for the day while it’s dispersing it won’t log the current reward amount. The work around is to wait a little while after the reward has dispersed before leaving the reward area.Second bug. When the tray is extending the app reports that it has no food. It shows in the amount that it has lost almost 200g while the tray extends. It the pop ups and says it has no food and to confirm but it really does!

Working well so far, the battery backup has been really nice as we've lost power for days at a time during recent winter storms. Getting the wifi set up was a bit of a pain, I could not get it to connect through the app on my Android device but it worked after being set up on an iPhone. The app works well, but it would be nice to have notifications when the food level gets below a certain point, and have it stop feeding if there is leftover food in the tray.

These feeders are a great price for all the features. The app worked perfectly, and was easy to setup. we bought two, 1 for each cat and set each one up without any hiccups. my only complaint is that the "Resting" food scale doesn't measure very accurately but doesn't effect the way the dispenser dispenses food, its just more of an fyi on how much food is in the food bowl. There was a firmware update I applied when setting it up and also did a calibration of the dispenser. They work well and dispense food evenly. Its nice to be able to go on vacation and see that the feeders are feeding our animals. you can even remotely give them a treat!

We have a cat that was waking us up around 2 am every night to be fed. Tried a lot of different things to get her to stop but being a cat she was persistent. Bought this gem and set up some small feeding times overnight and the cat hasn’t bothered us at night since. Only complaint is the microphone doesn’t seem to work on it/ can’t do a recording and sometimes it comes disconnected from the wireless network for an unknown reason. Very accurate with the timing and amount of food for the automatic drops. It’s also great if my wife and I get stuck at work late or go out to dinner we can feed the cat right from the phone and not have to worry about going home to feed the cat