Cat Behavior

This page is still being built.

Petcube: Using a camera to observe kitty.

I boght one. They list at $200, but you can find them on sale for $180. I got an open box one for significantly less. I suspect that is because the previous purchaser thought it was defective, and the store just wanted it out of the building.

 So, it is a pain to set up, but if you persist, it normally will hook up. Having to disable your phone's broadband network connection and be sure you are only on 2.4 GHz wifi is a pain but you can achieve it. Many people have had issues, but it can eventually be done.

At first, it seems pretty cool. You get notifications, you can listen, you can talk to kitty, and you can move a laser pointer around.

But as you use it more, you find a few things out:

Laser pointer:

There is a "calibration" mode so you match where the laser pointer goes with where you touch on the screen. It does not work well, and it takes a while to get it even close, often the pointer goes off into space somewhere. This should be simple, but it is not. Afraid of blinding my kitty accidentally, I turned it off.

Triggering:

I was getting hundreds of events, and realized that it was triggering on motion (good) and sound (bad for me). Since the unit was in the kitchen area, it picked up sounds from 20 feet away and triggered all the time.

OK, so turn off the sound detection trigger. No soap! I cannot turn off the triggering by sound detection (the app says it is off, but I still get recordings triggered only by sound). Not good, get a lot of recordings where sound is picked up from the next room, pain in the butt.

App goofiness:

So the app shows you the list of videos, and when it works, it's kind of cool, shows the video and sort of animates it with a few frames. Very neat, but half the time you get a white box with not picture, and the controls in the box to view or delete are also white, dumb.

Also, the main app screen does not work in landscape mode, but when you go to the video it switches.. so if you are looking at a number of videos, you are CONSTANTLY rotating your screen between landscape and portait. Absolutely ridiculous.

Also, usually you cannot scroll the screen completely down to the bottom of the last video. Petcube, who does your software QA?

Nagging:

The stupid app keeps bugging you to pay for storage after your 30 day trial, and takes part of the screen doing it.

The final straw:

But the worst part is because unless you pay $10 a month, you only get recordings for the last 4 hours. Most people read the box and figure they get 4 hours of recording. NOT SO! You only get recordings that are less than 4 hours old.

So, if you want to see what your cat is doing overnight, you CAN'T, because nothing older than 4 hours is stored.

See this page, you see how misleading it is:

https://petcube.com/care/?utm_source=MailChimp&utm_medium=email&content=care&utm_campaign=laborday3

Any reasonable person reads this as you get 4 hours of recording, just like paying for it, you get 10 ro 30 days... it is misleading.

Why not just give people 4 total hours of storage, or even one hour total? With clips only 6 to 30 seconds that would be great.  The darn thing costs $200, where is the value?

Bottom line:

Very disappointed. $10 a month is $120 a year. This is way more expensive than it is worth, more than a Netflix subscription, which clearly uses more resources and bandwidth.