A wifi enabled cat feeder

 We are a cat keeping household, which can be a problem when we both need to be away overnight,

Up to now we've relied on these cheap plastic gravity fed cat feeders, which work but have their own problems, including a tendency to sometimes jam.

One of our cats, Lucy, is a bit of a guzzler, and is not above stealing some of our other cat's food. At home we feed them together and make sure that Oscar gets to eat his dinner while Lucy eats hers.

So we decided we needed something a little more sophisticated and settled on a wifi enabled cat feeder

it's basically just a little machine that doles out about 10g of cat nibbles at set times throughout the day and. having two bowls means that if they are hungry and hear the cat feeder, they can both eat at the same time.

You can get more sophisticated versions with a camera, a speaker and so on so that you can have something kind of like Facetime for Felines, but we just went for the base version.

The device is powered from a USB socket, and has a battery backup so that the furries will still get fed if the power goes out - always something to consider if you live rurally, as we do.

Setup is fairly straightforward, or would have been if I'd remembered to put in the back up battery first.

You download an app and connect via bluetooth to the cat feeder, configure a wifi connection and then configure the device.

It's all fairly intuitive. 

At first I thought wifi was overkill, but actually it turned out to be useful, as the internet connection meant you could check that the cats had been fed, and that something had not gone awry with the device. 

You can also cancel feeding sessions remotely, which meant that once we knew roughly when we were going to be home we could stop it dispensing cat kibble, as we would feed them wet food when we got home.

While we wouldn't want to leave the cats alone for too long with only Radio National for company (perhaps because we have RN on at home in the mornings they've grown to like it as background noise), it does mean that we can leave them alone overnight or possibly even a couple of days if necessary ...