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It's a nice high-level writeup of getting a flakey piece of consumer electronics back in service, though he used an ESP8266, so I am not sure about the title.

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To add more to the confusion, twice in the text of TFA he refers to an ESP8622, which AFAIK isn’t a thing. The ESP8266 is fine in this application of course since he’s using a single GPIO pin.

Accidental Dyscalculia

I think the author is not an embedded guy and assumed that ESP32 is the generic name given to these sort of devices.

Either way, I am sure this was a fun project and he achieved what he wanted to do. But if this happened to me I would probably try to reverse engineer the device to free it from PetNet cloud. It would be fun and cool and interesting and I would probably never finish it..

There are a few projects out there that were based around reverse-engineering, and running a local server with DNS hijacking to make the feeder use them as its CC server[1]. But I mostly just wanted something that could sit happily in HomeAssistant along with all the other automations, so ESPhome based device it is

And yeah, I'm not an embedded guy, but I've updated the article with an addendum

[1]: https://github.com/feedernet/petnet-feeder-service/wiki/Gett...

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