I also left a review & got the standard email that it’s proprietary because it’s battery powered 
They did say they are thinking about opening up their API but I’m absolutely not convinced. Hopefully we get a local solution one day!
ok, just bought a surepet catdoor , i see a a 500 reply thread, can someone give me a summary of whats possible or not with local deployment?
thnx 
Nothing is possible locally anymore.
As @flyize mentioned, the summary is that petcare has been always blocking any intent of local control and with the latest firmware the local control is impossible, so we have decided to start a campain to give them one star reviews until they listen to our years of asking the same “please give an option for local control”, you can find the details in this comment: Local Deployment for SureFlap / SurePetCare Connect using only local MQTT Broker - #467 by heisenberg
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I see indeed some one star reviews, seems they are responding to it, but what do they say? Does it help?
They are only responsive because they are worried about the one star reviews, but that´s their only incentive, as their response has been exactly the same for years: “we are sorry” (lie), “we may implement a local API in the future” (lie), basically all lies expecting that the promise of a local API in a future that will never come will make us happy enough to remove the review.
Surepet even tries to remove the one star reviews by asking you to provide the details of your purchase (fortunately trustpilot doesn´t have any way to validate that, so any info you provide will work, and you don´t need to disclose the info about your purchase with them).
Surepet, if you are reading this (I´m sure you are), we will not stop writting one star reviews until you provide a local API to your catflap and other devices.
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Sorry but thats bullshit and really kiddie like… Sure Petcare never promised or even talked about a local API? Why do you think you deserve one, despite you knew before buying a flap that there is no and probably will be no local API? And giving a bad rating because you miss a feature YOU WISH but never was even intended by the vendor to implement… lol wtf?!
And how many other vendors of such devices provide a local API? Do you even know a single one?
Sure Petcare was over the last years not very talky to “us”, but in general I would say we have a good relation to them and we can inofficially use their web API since years! It would be easy for them to prevent that immediately…
So maybe think next time before you buy something and also before you post such bullshit here. The issue here is clearly on your side if you buy products and imagine that the vendor has nothing else todo than implement new features for you… So, please dont try to hurt “our” relation to Sure Petcare here, thanks!
I would like one because they endangered the lives of my cats with their outage. Once a pet flap with a local API is available, I’ll move to it. In the meantime, it doesn’t hurt to ask, or even demand.
No reason to get all agro.
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yeah, thats fully okay, but voting down an App because it doesnt include a feature that was never promised and even motivating others to do the same makes me agro, sry 
@benleb no need to get angry. I am not sure if you have followed the history of our efforts to try to make the hub from surepet accessible locally, but I can give you a summary: surepet has done everything in their power to stop all our efforts to be able to access our devices without having to use their cloud (yes, those devices that we paid full price for, and that most of us didn´t know that we were “renting” instead of buying, because that´s exactly what´s happening here, when your device must use their cloud to work, you are renting their device). If surepet decides tomorrow that they are not earning enough money and they start charging each of us a monthly fee to use our devices, will you be happy about that?
I am not sure in which dream you have seen any communication or even an effort to start a communication from surepet, but I can tell you many of us have been trying to contact them for years to discuss this, and we all have received the same response from them, complete silence!
We need to stop these companies from selling devices that cannot be operated without their cloud, and the only way available as customers are the negative reviews. I wish there were more companies offering similar devices and I´m sure there will be in the future, but in the meantime the excuse of “a company can do whatever they want” is not valid to me as a customer. If I pay full price for a device, I want full access to that device, and I will NOT tolerate the risk of my cat being locked just because the servers of some company are down.
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FWIW, I’m pretty sure that @benleb is familiar with all of this, as the developer of SurePy.
And @benleb, its their string of outages that really drove this. That’s the reason for one star reviews, and something that could be fixed with a local API - or at least not totally block people from doing it.
My personal view in this is I spent a good 5 months of all my spare time reverse engineering the API, hub, wireless and MQTT protocol, starting a hub replacement project and documenting everything for others and all I got was grief about it was missing this or that or too complicated to deploy.
Then surepet decided to completely replace the firmware locking everything out so my project was effectively dead in the water.
And no one to date has written a meaningful PR to any of my code or said they would like to pick it up.
Also had significant sickness issues and needed to focus on my family and my paying work rather than my hobbies.
Me view is building a complete hub replacement is the only real option using a ESP32 or a pi and a Zigbee radio but even then surepet could or may already have deployed new firmware to all the end devices again completely destroying all work by the community.
My hub and stack still works fine at home and I’m really disappointed surepet continues the BS they do, the problem is there aren’t any better quality alternatives for doors on the market I have seen. And my pet door runs these days without batteries as my dog struggled to trigger the door with his tag and I needed to keep it open for 10 seconds for him to get though.
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Out of curiosity, anyone tried below? For the pet door version running C batteries? There are also power adapters for AA batteries…
That´s exactly my point @peterl I am so sorry that you have seen how 5 months of your time and effort trying to improve a product for the community completely for free have ended up wasted just because surepet doesn´t even want to talk to us or discuss about the reasons behind such stubborn behaviour.
Unfortunately the only weapon we have as frustrated customers against this type of behaviour from certain companies is the negative reviews, and it is the only thing that these companies listen to when it´s loud enough, so I really hope one day there will be enough of us writing negative reviews to force surepet to listen and talk to us.
@benleb sorry about the confusion, I wasn´t aware you created SurePy, and if you were lucky enough to have any type of contact with surepet during the creation of SurePy please feel free to share it as I would love to change my opinion about them, but my experience is that surepet has done everything in their hands to stop us, and we don´t understand the reason behind it. We have only seen a bit of a reaction after writting the negative reviews (and not a good reaction, just a request to provide proof of our purchase, and then an email trying to convince us to delete the review)
I wrote a 1-star review on trustpilot and also got an answer from surepetcare:
Thank you for your interest in our Sure Petcare products, and I am sorry to hear that you are not fully satisfied with the way they operate.
While we use an industry standard communication method, we do not use the same protocol of communication, mainly because our products are battery powered and therefore, we cannot work the same way and still maintain a reasonable battery life.
We are currently in the process of updating our products range and services, and we feel that in the future we may have an open API, but currently this is not something we can offer to you or support.
Please do keep an eye on our website and social media feeds for any further updates on open API and other product integration.
With best wishes,
Valentina
because it’s the exact same answer everbody got they don’t seem to listen and therefore would like to lose their market advantage in the future. It’s very sad that there are many comanies out there with stubborn decision makers which would have a lot of potential but are loosing against more inovative companies.
It’s also a very poor reason to give. Doesn’t surepet use their own zigbee protocol? I have plenty of battery powered zigbee devices that work fine so can’t understand why that would be a reason.
Of course, that is totally BS. They could have use the standard zigbee protocol and save a lot of money in development, but no, they decided to spend the money and effort to modify the zigbee protocol so it is not standard, and we cannot use our zigbee networks to integrate their devices (which would have been amazing). Instead, we have to “rent” their hub and hope that their servers are up and running so our pets can enter the house.
By the way, anyone with knowledge about zigbee knows that the zigbee protocol is the most efficient protocol for battery operated devices (and obviously that is the reason they took it as a base for their “custom” protocol), so the excuse about battery is complete BS.
I recently purchased the pet door, I have the feeling that the cloud is quite slow, if I lock or unlock, it takes about 5 seconds … Is that normal behavior?
Yes that is normal behaviour for cloud based devices, and to be honest the surepet devices are some of the slowest devices I have seen (my guess is that their servers receive too much traffic so they had to reduce the frequency of updates), and that is one of the multiple reasons we are asking for local control, which would be instant as it wouldn´t rely on the internet connection or the servers of the company.
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hey @Eriksen @pdwonline @amelchio @user_id_for_q
I saw you were busy on finding a good adapter replacement?
Have you found on working out of the box? I have the C batteries
i tried
1 x 6V adapter : https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005006235953837.html
2 x 3V adapter : https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005007093930042.html
in both cases, rfid doesnt work
maybe i need a better power supply ? will 7V work? or will it kill the door?