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DecksLabs / petwant-f3-alt-firmware

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Add a readme with instructions #1

Open mcus opened 1 year ago

mcus commented 1 year ago

Hi! Interesting project, I'm looking to flash my F3 and run it locally since I can't seem to get it to connect to any of the Petwant apps anymore. Is it possible for you to guide me with a simple step-by-step?

DecksLabs commented 1 year ago

Hi @mcus,

Sadly motor in my F3 worn out and stopped working altogether so I didn't finish this. I have replacement waiting to be installed sometime in the future.

mcus commented 1 year ago

Ah bummer! Are you looking to replace it with another model/brand, or just the motor?

Don't know why but when I try to reconnect the F3 on iOS with the official/latest petwant app it gets identified/added as a F1 but then won't connect. On Android it won't even find it. The whole connecting to servers online is kind of overkill — looking for an alternative where I can connect it locally.

DecksLabs commented 1 year ago

I got the motor. Keep in mind that even if I finish, this mod requires soldering as this whole thing is ridiculously made. Seems like petwant bought some off the shelf cloud solution for IoT and slapped it to the feeder. Poorly. I removed the original controller IC and put esp8266 there. Reverse engineering protocol between the original WiFi Chip and controller IC seemed like too much trouble.

yeah, my unit was a pain in the butt as well and at some point just stopped connecting to WiFi at all. Other brands that are available in Poland don't seem trustworthy either...

mcus commented 1 year ago

That's awesome! I've got a soldering kit, so it would be an interesting "DIY"-project to try out :) Where do you buy your esp8266? Got a bunch of hits on Ebay/amazon, but not sure if they are ok.

Yeah, many IoT products are weird in that sense, like there are a bunch of "smart" light bulbs that also needs to connect to an online server to be turned on/off, and will brick when those services are EOL ;D

Keep up the great work — really fun to see someone picking this feeder apart :)

DecksLabs commented 1 year ago

Local eBay competition/AliExpress. Amazon isn't really a thing here. What's important is to get ESP-12F modules which are one of the most common, with 1MB flash (this allows OTA updates and some space for storage) and Node MCU clones for development. I just buy what's cheapest at the moment. For the feeder I used node MCU right now. So I suggest buying some node MCU clones to get started.

Thanks for reaching out, by the way. You have motivated me to do something about it :⁠-⁠)