The Internet of Cats

After I’d spent thousands of dollars on Google hardware, Google’s fix for the features I couldn’t use was simple: be someone else.

Specifically, someone with a different email address.

The problem was my Google Workspace account. Years earlier, back when it was called Google Apps, Google pitched it as the way to give your family its own domain and email addresses. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I set up. Google, it turns out, only meant it at the time.

I couldn’t invite anyone to my Google Home. Nest thermostats and smoke detectors wouldn’t take the account. Familiar-face detection on the Nest doorbell didn’t recognize me as a valid customer, let alone a face. Then my Pixel Watch delivered the encore: no Fitbit data for Workspace users.

My account was good enough to buy the ecosystem. Using it came with terms and conditions.

Switching email addresses wasn’t a fix. Home, Photos, Wallet and everything else connected didn’t come with a “move my life over here” button. The suggested solution was, functionally, to start over, and hope the new account stayed the right kind of customer longer than the last one.

So I installed Home Assistant.

Around the same time, my cameras picked up a stray tuxedo kitten living in a missing-brick hole in a cinderblock wall.

Suddenly my search history was half Zigbee, half kitten food.

Aqara noticed.

A home I don’t have to operate

I founded The Worst Agency. I’ll put real hours into making a system work, but I expect something back for the effort. In the loft, that something is not having to think about it.

There’s no wall-mounted tablet. No dashboard full of buttons for jobs a light switch used to handle. The switches still work. Everything else works around them. Mostly, you just live there.

The alarm is a good example.

I built it from repurposed parts: a random keypad, magnetic door sensors, vibration sensors, motion and presence sensors, facial recognition, GPS, and the clock.

The sensor count isn’t the interesting part. What the system can work out from them is.

Movement alone doesn’t tell you anything is wrong. Movement plus who’s home, who’s at the door, and what time it is tells you a lot. The system uses that context to arm and disarm itself around normal life. NFC handles disarming and unlocking at the door.

Remember the familiar-face detection Google wouldn’t give me? I built my own. The Reolink doorbell streams locally into Frigate, which runs object detection on a Coral accelerator and face recognition on top of that. No cloud service has to work out who’s on my doorstep. Getting it to stop confusing people with each other took months of tuning, which is the part nobody puts on the box.

I don’t set the alarm before bed. I don’t remember to turn it off in the morning. No app asks me for a small administrative contribution to my evening.

If it trips, the quiet competence ends. The siren goes off and every light in the loft turns on, and the place becomes a very loud, very unwelcoming disco.

Otherwise, the work stays out of sight.

That’s the challenge I actually enjoy: getting a pile of imperfect devices to cooperate well enough that the person living with them never has to care how. Adding a device is easy to show off. Removing a daily chore doesn’t screenshot well.

A new occupant

The kitten was about six months old. Her name is Simone.

I still had food left from my previous cat, who had died, so I had something to offer when she showed up on camera. She accepted. Negotiations have continued on her terms ever since.

So now I had two research projects. One was rebuilding the infrastructure in my loft. The other was a small animal living in a wall. As far as I was concerned, they had nothing to do with each other.

That lasted until she moved in.

I’d built the alarm to be foolproof for people. Simone was not in the spec. The floor-height motion sensors kept spotting her, disarming the alarm and turning on the main lights at hours nobody had asked for. Every fix turned up a new break point. The presence radar counted her as a person too, so before the system arms at night, it now waits five minutes and checks again. I had to rethink the whole setup around a new perp.

She is, technically, a variable.

Then the ads for an Aqara automatic pet feeder started.

Of course.

The creative wasn’t the clever part

I don’t remember much about the ad itself.

What I remember is being shown one product that answered both things I was actively researching. Cat supplies, meet home automation. Here’s somewhere to put your attention and your money.

I can’t see inside the delivery system, and I don’t know exactly which signals put that ad in front of me. But from my side, two separate lines of intent met at a single product.

That’s what interested me professionally.

The ad didn’t have to make me want a cat or talk me into automating anything. Both decisions were already made. It just showed up at the intersection.

Marketing spends a lot of time on what an ad says. Here, the better question was why I was seeing it right then. The targeting did the work. The creative mostly had to stay out of the way.

I recognized the funnel.

I also wanted the feeder.

Knowing how the trick works does not exempt you from checkout.

Dinner on the local network

The feeder still had to earn its place in the system.

It uses Zigbee, and in my setup it runs locally through Home Assistant. In plain terms: my house talks to it directly. No cloud service has to sign off on dinner.

After the Google experience, that mattered. So did a ten-hour internet outage, during which my cloud-only Wi-Fi lights couldn’t be turned off. They’ve since been moved to local control too. I wanted to decide how my home works without finding out later that my email address disqualified me.

The feeder wasn’t why I installed Home Assistant. It was a fun bonus afterward: useful for Simone, interesting for me to wire up.

The marketing got me to consider it. Local control is why it stayed.

Simone now gets fed three times a day. She knows exactly when, and she starts supervising well in advance.

I put the schedule in the system. She appointed herself compliance officer.

Early on, I gave her reason to expect a lot more from it.

Forty what?

While setting up portion control, I assumed the quantity was in grams.

I wanted 40 grams.

I entered 40.

The feeder counts in portions.

It dispensed 40 portions, roughly 400 grams of food.

The key configuration question was “forty what?” I had blown past it with total confidence.

It was basically making it rain. Kibble jingled into the stainless steel bowl and kept coming, and the evening turned into a game of Pac-Man: me collecting food as fast as I could, Simone eating it as fast as she could. She was winning.

This wasn’t a device failure. The feeder did exactly what I told it. I supplied the wrong unit, and it gave me a very physical explanation of the difference.

Local control doesn’t protect you from yourself.

But it does hand you a mistake you can understand and fix. That’s a much better class of problem than being told to rebuild your accounts to use hardware you already own.

I’m happy to be responsible for my configuration. I’m less happy being responsible for keeping up with a vendor’s shifting definition of an eligible customer.

Mostly, nothing happens

The best part of the setup isn’t the feeder, the alarm, or any single device. It’s how little attention the whole thing needs.

The alarm runs itself off normal activity. The switches work without a tutorial. Meals arrive on schedule. Nobody needs a dashboard tour to live here.

That took technical work. The payoff is that living here doesn’t feel like technical work.

That’s the job at The Worst Agency too. Clients hire us for branding, paid media, SEO and storytelling. The story and the brand are the parts people see. The targeting, the search work and the systems underneath are the plumbing, and we build that carefully enough that nobody has to look at it. As the cat feeder proves, that’s usually the part doing the selling.

And the ad? It worked. It reached me while I was looking, connected two interests, and sold me something that fit what I was building. I don’t need to pretend I outsmarted it. I got a useful device. Aqara got a customer.

Google gave me a reason to rebuild. Simone gave me someone to build around.

The 400-gram service has been discontinued.