NaibofTabr

And small businesses.

To each their own. I prefer having the ability to adjust things from 1 central source. I’m prone to losing remotes.

My preference is for devices to be as simple and reliable and end-user repairable as possible. I have an aversion to any kind of appliance that might be dependent on someone else to update software or maintain a network service to keep operational. No software dependence at all if possible, just a basic microcontroller and firmware. Again, there’s nothing to this that needs to be any more advanced or complicated than the functions of a basic alarm clock like this:

Instead of setting off an alarm, we’re activating the feeding mechanism. Dead simple. Hell, you could probably make this yourself by wiring the alarm from a clock like this to a motor that moves the feeding mechanism.

Also, how would you do such a remote. You would also need a screen for feedback etc, which puts you back at square 1.

Nah, there’s no reason feeding times need to be any more granular than per-hour. You can show that with a 2x6 grid of 12 indicator LEDs, with a 13th AM/PM indicator. On lights indicate hours when feeding will activate. You could have that on both the remote and the feeder, cheap and easy. Maybe you have a 14th indicator that lights up if the food in the storage bin is low and needs refilling.

Also, a remote would be considerably more expensive than the extra cost of a ZigBee/Wifi enabled microcontroller.

Definitely not, because it’s not fair to count the cost of only the link hardware on the feeder, you have to account for the cost of the rest of the smart home system to operate it. A remote like this is dirt cheap:

You’re over thinking what this really needs to do. It’s a timer that activates a switch, that’s all.

Environmental damage. The Trump administration has canceled green energy projects (wasting hundreds of millions of previously invested funding in the process), supported fossil fuel companies, removed protections from federal land, defunded environmental regulatory agencies, and disabled climate monitoring conducted by NOAA, NASA and NWS.

Above and beyond everything else that Trump is responsible for, the environmental damage is going to be affecting not just US citizens but the entire world far into the future. Nothing else will compare to the scale of human suffering and death that will be caused by the Trump administration’s environmental policies.

The other things that have been mentioned are more immediate and visceral and tend to provoke stronger emotional responses, but the environmental damage is going to last much longer, be much more difficult to fix, and kill many many more people.

OK, add a simple remote control with buttons for adjusting the schedule and triggering a manual feed. No need for that to be any more complicated than a TV remote from the 90s. Keep it offline, no problem.

Why in fuck would a device that activates a motor once or twice a day on a schedule need any kind of network connectivity? This is an ultra-dumb programmatic function, it shouldn’t need any more compute power than an alarm clock. Why would you hook it up to a smart home anything?

It should be exactly this complicated:

Anything beyond that is like killing a housefly with a bazooka.

Or push ads, or gather data on users.

“Vhen rockets go up, who cares vhere zey come down? Zat’s not my department!”

Sarcasm aside, you can buy these in dev kits on MicroCenter:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/691058/nvidia-jetson-orin-nano-super-developer-kit

Which means the components are pretty widely available. I’m not sure how you’d prevent someone from ordering a bunch to an in-between country and then shipping them on to Russia after.