Backup auto-cycle feature for LR's failing to cycle
Several years ago, something terrible happened. Around here we call it the “Poopneck Incident.”
We’ve had LR’s for our cats for about 6 years now. It’s generally awesome, until it isn’t. So many failure modes - power outages, flaky pinch sensors, missed cat detection - all with the same outcome. No automatic cycling.
I’m not sure how you discover this situation in your household, but for us, it was the “Poopneck Incident”. You see, our dog, a spicy little schanuzer-poo with long wavy hair; well, let’s just say, he likes to eat at the Litter Robot buffet whenever it opened for business. We have no video, so we aren’t sure exactly what happened, but he got a fresh cat log stuck under his chin and all smushed into his neck hair. We only found out about it when he jumped up on the back of the couch and tried to snuggle by our head. It was truly disgusting.
If this had happened only once, then fine. But, sadly, as our LR3 aged, this happened again. And again. We tried cleaning sensors and doing other maintenance. But the problem didn’t go away.
After the third “Poopneck Incident”, I was done. Fortunately as a software developer, and thanks to pylitterbot, I built a system that I called Litter Sentry. It checked the LR status every hour and would auto-cycle if it had been too long. This pretty much solved the problem for me. The stress melted away.
But, this was a few years ago, and I wasn’t sure how to make it available to others without running a service. And asking people to set up their own hosting for this seemed like too much for the average LR user. Also, I had upgraded to a LR4 and was hoping that the problem would be gone, so I retired Litter Sentry.
But unfortunately while on vacation this summer, the LR4 stopped cycling. We keep the LR in a different place now behind a cat door, so that prevents a “Poopneck Incident” but our cats still revolted and peed and poo’d where they weren’t supposed. A different kind of terrible.
I was about to spin back up my old system, but coincidentally I just heard about a new platform for hosting small personal apps for non-techie people called Charming. And you can share projects! It was the perfect platform for Litter Sentry. So, I ported the app to run on it and it’s been working perfectly the last few days.
note: even though this post is about some software I wrote, it's 100% free, open/no-ads, and has zero affiliate hooks. seriously, it's just for community to use. I made it, it works, and I just want other people to be able to use it. I made it fun and silly because it's about cat poop. I make a lot of open-source software, but software like this has to be hosted somewhere.
The upshot is that now anyone can run their own Litter Sentry with one click! Charming seems to allow free hosting as well, so I hope Litter Sentry can help many others save tons of time and frustration and help your LR live up to its true potential of de-hassling litter box maintenance. It should be just a few clicks and you’ll have a Litter Sentry standing guard over your fleet of LR’s.
“Litter Sentry” app template on Charming: https://charm.ing/apinstein/litter-robot-sentry
LMK if you find this useful, and also do you have your own “Poopneck Incident”?
Enjoy!