[Joseph DiGiovanni] is the proprietor of a Litter Robotic 4. It’s a handy mechanized litter field for cats that may clear itself to scale back unwelcome odors inside the house. He wished to run automations based mostly on the operation of the litter field, however was not keen to make use of the producer’s cloud service to do it. As an alternative, he set about reverse engineering the machine for his personal ends.
Because the Litter Robotic 4 depends on an ESP32 microcontroller for exterior connectivity, it was totally potential for [Joseph] to whip up a customized firmware for the machine as an alternative. He began with ESPHome as a base, which is a well-liked firmware used for constructing smarthome gadgets based mostly on Espressif {hardware}. The structure of the Litter Robotic 4 helped on this regard. It makes use of a PIC microcontroller to deal with the low stage {hardware} management, whereas the ESP32 is answerable for connecting to the cloud over WiFi. This allowed [Joseph] to mess with the connectivity options and get the machine hooked as much as House Assistant with out compromising the fundamental mechancial performance of the machine or any of the protection options.
All [Joseph] needed to do was work out how the unique {hardware}’s ESP32 talked to the PIC and emulate that in his personal firmware, which was achieved with some snooping and knowledge seize and processing with an LLM. This was used as a foundation to whip up an ESPHome firmware that might combine the {hardware} neatly with House Assistant.
Information are on Codeberg for these desirous to tinker. It’s not the primary time we’ve checked out cat litter administration, and it received’t be the final. Video after the break.
