Sureflap Connect - Pet Door

Third party integrations
266

Hi, just installed HA and this is one of the three things I wanted to get up and running. Absolute noob at all this, but managed to edit my Yaml and added correct details.

Now on my basic overview in HA, I can see 4 cat flap related circles.
2 are blue and 2 are red. The first Blue is the Home/Inside status, and this is correctly updating when the cat comes and goes (or when I change its status in the surecare app).

The second blue is pet hub kitty connect activity and I believe it was marked as unavailable. I’ve changed that to available to see if it does anything, but while it is blue, it’s saying entity unavailable, and offering me to remove it.

The two red circle ones are Battery percentage and pet_flap kitty hub.
Both offer me the same entity unavailable and is an orphan to be removed, and offering me to remove each of them.

I don’t think the second and fourth ones are needed (I don’t need to k ow if the things are connected or not), but I would like to see battery status… any ideas why I cant see them?
Cheers

267

I’m only using the cat feeders, no flaps.

The information is pretty limited… my cats are always just away, and the feeders are connected, great.

I looked just in that start json, and I found a couple of things that I thought were interesting adds:

Pets -> x -> date_of_birth
Pets -> x -> photo -> location
Pets -> x -> status -> feeding -> at
Devices -> x -> status -> version -> device

1 Like
268

Same here, 2 feeders, no flaps. Using this integration as a way mostly to track the status of the batteries/when it’s time to recharge them, since that’s all that’s publicly available via the integration.

The cats always show as away even when I change the scan_interval to a lower value, so it doesn’t look like I can get anything more of value out of this unfortunately. :frowning:

Curious, what would be the purpose of DOB, location, version/device etc if they were pulled into HomeAssistant? I can think of automations (or notifications) through the feeding JSON snippet you found, but not the others.

1 Like
269

Hey,
whats the process to request updates?
would be great if we could start to pull some more feeder information, specifically around the amount of food put down and then also eaten.
good to monitor what the cat is being given and if they are eating it all or not

1 Like
270

I’ve just set up my two feeders and hub - that’s a breeze both on the surepet and homeassistant sides.

I do agree it would be cool to get the photo and feeding date/times, perhaps amounts, into home assistant.
Perhaps also how much food was given.

Based on just the battery status - I think I’ll set the interval to once every day or so.
There’s no value in getting the battery status more often than that, for © batteries that should survive for half a year at least.

At some point before these batteries expire, I want to investigate replacing them with battery adapters, such as this one:

https://www.allekabels.nl/c-batterij/4573/3311879/batterij-adapter-2-x-c.html

It turns out C batteries are pretty expensive themselves (€2,50 per non rechargeable battery… requiring 2x2 per feeder).

What I would love to be able to do is to automagically open the lid if there is no food in the feeder. That would save me from reaching behind the feeders and pressing a button.

1 Like
271

Hi, I’d love to add control of the lock status, but I can’t get my head around what I need to do.

Right now I’ve got the main Sureflap enabled in HA (I didn’t actually install it, I think it’s a core component?)
All I have done is add my credentials/cat ID under surepetcare: in my config.yaml file.

This currently only shows me my cats inside/outside status (it works accurately). The two other sensors (battery and kitty hub) are showing as unavailable.

So can anyone help me achieve adding control of locking/unlocking? (Battery level would be a secondary goal).

I’m alright at editing .py files, but since I never installed any, I have no idea where to begin?

My end goal is to write a basic script that allows me to Lock/Unlock the flap (which I would then tie in with google assistant, and have successfully done with other triggers this way)

Thanks for any help on where to start!

Edit: should add, i SSH into my HA and edit on a PC if that matters

272

Sorry, I am busy currently due to my masters thesis… Be back in last week of november where I will integrate the top requested lock/unlock feature into surepy (the library used by the home assistant integration).

If anyone is in a hurry… PRs are welcome and merged as fast as possible :+1:

5 Likes
273

btw., surepy now includes the surepy cli :paw_prints: which makes it much easier to get a token from the API

1 Like
274

@benleb fantastic news! Considering there’s an API now does that mean we could potentially see more information from the readers?

2 Likes
275

One can only wish the Sure Petcare addon had as awesome support for Connected Feeder as it has for SureFlaps… :frowning:

Currently having only these two entities:

  • binary_sensor.feeder_surefeed_connectivity
  • sensor.feeder_surefeed_battery_level

I’d love to get all the same information into Home Assistant as I get in the Sure Petcare mobile app;

  • how much food has been eaten (from which bowl (dry / wet))
  • how many times has been eaten
  • at what time has been eaten
  • how long the feeds lasted
  • how much food (and from which bowl) was consumptioned during the feed

etc… If only I knew how to code Python or had time to learn Python along with Golang, I’d do it myself :smiley:

But if someone was willing to do such addition to this addon, I’d be more than happy to donate some money (not much though, I’m not rich :D).

And also, if needed, I could be a beta tester.

Anywho, who ever created the Sure Petcare in the first place; thank you so much, I was happily surprised that even this was an existing addon in Home Assistant!

276

about the feeders (I unfortunately still do not own one myself)… I can get data like this about a pet regarding the food…

"feeding": {
    "tag_id": 256,
    "device_id": 195,
    "change": [
        -27.39,
        12.32
    ],
    "at": "2020-10-17T08:48:23+00:00"
}

can anyone with a feeder make sense of this? I know it has two bols which the two numbers refer to probably…tag/device_id refers to the cat/feeder and I guess the values are in gramm? And in this example, the cat eat 27g from one bowl and put 13g in the other? It seems a little strange that someone puts in 13g while the cat eats?! (I got just a handful of examples, maybe they are bad but not just this one has strange values)

and the following about the feeder itself

"control": {
    "bowls": {
        "settings": [
            {
                "food_type": 2,
                "target": 150
            }
        ],
        "type": 1
    },
    "fast_polling": false,
    "lid": {
        "close_delay": 20
    },
    "training_mode": 0
}

besides the target and food_type, whats of interest from this?

277

I would say that the training_mode would be useful to generate an alert if it had been inadvertently left in that mode.

The close_lid delay is something that’s a ‘set and forget’, I assume, so for me, not really needed in HA.

278

All the food info would be great please
How much went down / was eaten

279

preview :v:

image
image481×628 32 KB

4 Likes
280

It would be a really good feature if the door lock/unlock feature would be available from HA. Can you help how to use?

1 Like
282

Hey @benleb,

With regards to the food i suspect this is after someone has filled the feeder.
I have two feeders. When you went quiet i started to look at this but have paused as i seen you have come back.

So with the feeders you set the target food for the day for the cat. Then as you fill it up during the day, the weight adds up to confirm you have given the right amount. I think this is the confusion regarding the food.

There is one more option which i was trying to work out. This is to zero the bowls. The weight gets affected sometimes and they need to reset to zero. I did see the option to do this BUT i am not sure if it would be any good to people as the automation idea could not work.

I am more than happy to share my findings with the feeders.

Cheers

Ross

283

same
im happy to run anything you need against my feeder and/or setup a zoom session so you can look yourself.

How can i donate some $ to your effort on this?

284

I too have a couple of these feeders and can possibly assist with testing, but I’m a rank beginner on all of the tech involved.

I’ve so far managed to set up my RPi 4 with Raspbian, and am running Home Assistant Supervised in Docker, so that I don’t have to limit my RPi to only being a HASS server. I’ve enabled the SurePetcare plugin and I’ve got both the family cats showing up, along with the cat-flap and both feeders. However, this is where my understanding falls down a bit.

I’ve installed surepy, but running ‘surepy --help’ simply errors out with ‘surepy: command not found’. I assume I need to register the executable somewhere? Also, how does surepy integrate with the surepetcare plugin in HASS? I looked at the documentation but couldn’t immediately see how.
Thanks in advance!

285

Does anyone have issues with their Sureflap not updating the pet information for HA integration?

Yesterday the hub server of surepetcare went down for 12 hours since it is back the app and the webpage does work but HA integration does not update the status of the cats.

When I try to get the pet id’s just to check if they changed or something through developer tools of Chrome I get full errors, and can’t fetch the id’s of the pets.

Someone else having same issue?

1 Like
286

Lock/Unlock is already working via the cli tool

regarding the problems today and in the last days… sure petcare (or AWS) has some problems currently, see https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/38204#issuecomment-734368486

btw, I will have some more time to care for this (and my other projects) now :v:

1 Like