AqaraSmart Pet Feeder C1, REQUIRES AQARA Zigbee 3.0 HUB, Automatic Feeder for Cats and Dogs, Auto Cat Food Dispenser with APP Control, Can be Controlled by Google, Alexa, Siri, Works with SmartThings

I recently purchased this innovative cat feeder, and it has transformed the way I care for my feline friends. Connecting it to Home Assistant via zigbee was a breeze, and it's made mealtime so much more convenient.Ease of Use: The setup was quick and straightforward. I had it connected to my home assistant in no time, allowing me to schedule feeding times and monitor food levels right from my device.Design and Quality: Sleek and modern, this cat feeder fits right into my home's decor. Its quality construction assures me that it will last for a long time, providing dependable service.Functionality: What I appreciate most is the feeder's ability to provide consistent meals for my cats, even when I'm away from home. The app's reminders and the option to adjust portions on-the-go give me peace of mind.

Works well, and integrates easily with home assistant. It’s zigbee so doesn’t actually need the Aqara hub specifically (I’m not using one myself), but Aqara devices in general can be a bit picky so do you homework. i wanted to set up an automation to dispense a small amount of food when someone is at the door to help train my dog not to bark and/or jump at the door, and some other stuff to help working on his separation anxiety, and it’s been 100% reliable so far.Some other notes since other reviews seem to be confused on what this is. By a “smart feeder”, it’s a feeder that works with home automation. That’s it. It’s not really smart in any other way. It doesn’t have extra sensors or anything. It just dispenses food.Also, thankfully I didn’t need it, but the “child lock” seems basically useless since it doesn’t keep you from removing the lid.Minus 1-star for no power adapter. I’m sure they’d feed me some line about the environment and “most people already have one”, but it obviously needs its own as it’s a 24/7 device. Nobody is going to unplug their pet feeder every time they need to charge their phone or whatever, so stop being cheap and include the entire product you are claiming to sell, especially at this price point.Edit: Took a couple months of use, but my dog did eventually figure out how to get the lid off of this. The bowl section is removable, so I put it high up on a bookshelf and now it just drops the food off the edge onto the floor. That said, I’m just using it for some treats here and there. If I wanted to dispense his actual meals and continue to use the bowl, I’d probably have to build some housing to go around it, which would be a nontrivial amount of work.

I bought this with the hopes of making it work directly with SmartThings. That was actually very easy. The settings are all available in the SmartThings app. This feeder does require a hub for installation, but I've got it paired directly to SmartThings via ZigBee without needing an Aqara hub. Overall, I'm happy with the purchase. I have 2 other feeders (Whisker Feeder-Robots). This Aqara feeder is not quite as sturdy a build as the Feeder Robots and also much smaller, but it's also $200 less expensive and I can control it directly in my smart home, not through a cloud based app. The Aqara feeder also came with a stainless steel bowl, which I had to pay extra for from Whisker. The Aqara feeder does come with a USB power cord, but not the power supply, so be aware that you will need an old phone charger supply or purchase a small adapter to power it.

Every device that I have tried from Aqara has always stopped working within 6 months. None of their devices like cameras, Doorbells or Other have lasted over a year! I will never use another device from this company again! Wasted money!

Love this thing. Works perfectly w/Home Assistant via zigbee2mqtt. Has never gone offline or missed a feeding in 2.5 years.

June 2023 edit: There's now been a Zigbee2MQTT update that fixes most of the issues I noted below. The clock is now in my local time and the default button to feed in Home Assistant works (little awkwardly, using a dropdown instead of a button but that's fine). Also the schedule shows in the settings normally! I updated to five stars.There are three ways you can set this thing up1. Aqara Hub + Aqara app to manage feeding schedules. Easiest out of the box solution. This is what the instructions say and what it pretends to only support. Depends on the cloud which is a non-starter for me2. ZHA with a Zigbee dongle in Home Assistant, managing feeding schedules through normal HA automations. This is what most reviewers seem to be opting for. This is not my method because 1) I have opted for Zigbee2MQTT over ZHA and MOST IMPORTANTLY 2) This method means the feeding is directly dependent on Home Assistant being available. This is what I normally do for other devices but I really don't like the idea of my cat being hungry because my server is down or the automation bugged out. Other reviews have stated that it's not possible at this time to publish the schedule to the feeder through ZHA and have it work on its own. Hopefully there's an update in the future to fix that.3. Zigbee2MQTT with a Zigbee dongle linked to Home Assistant. This is my method, and I chose it because I already use Z2M, but most importantly because as stated in option 2, the feeding schedule will continue working if my HA is down because the schedule is a state that is saved to the feeder itself. Z2M supports publishing a new schedule to it unlike ZHA (at the time of this review). My review is based on this method since I know many others use it too.For the janky stuff:* [Fixed in June 2023] The internal clock is in UTC. You need to account for this when creating the schedule. It seems that using the Aqara Hub method lets you change the time zone, but at this time Z2M does not. No review states this so I only found out after thinking the schedule wasn't working but my cat had actually already eaten :) this isn't a huge deal except that the "portions per day" and "weight per day" sensors reset at midnight, which for me in EST is actually 8pm. Minor annoyance as it means those stats are mostly useless if I want to graph them in Home Assistant* [Fixed in June 2023] In Z2M, the manual "feed: START" button is a button, but in HA it's a "selector" drop down with only "START" as a default option, so it doesn't do anything. I can't access Z2M from outside my house at this time without a VPN so out of the box I can't start a manual feeding from HA. I had to instead make a script in HA which sends the {"feed": "START"} payload to MQTT, and then in a dashboard I made a button to activate that script. Now it works! (screenshots attached)* Because HA is just reading the "schedule" from MQTT, it just shows up as one big JSON blurb instead of a concise schedule* [Fixed in June 2023] The schedule in Z2M shows as multiple blank feedings until you look at the state which actually describes them. You have to use the state to know which blank feeding is which.