Aaron Parecki

I just got the Aqara C1 cat feeder and within a few minutes had it connected directly to Home Assistant via Zigbee, and all the sensors and buttons showing up and working!

However, I then realized the ZHA method doesn't expose the scheduling interface of the feeder, so I can only drive it entirely via Home Assistant, no local on-device scheduling option.

I really wanted it to be self sufficient, just reporting state and being able to dispense food with HA, but I think I'll stick with this for now anyway. The failure mode is that my HA server goes down for some reason or the Zigbee controller dies, and the food doesn't get automatically dispensed. But even if I'm out of town, I always have someone come by to check on the cat at least once a day anyway, so I guess that will be the manual fallback option.