> cat owner sick of being woken by his “ruthless serial killer” kitty delivering gifts in the middle of the night

Cats should stay inside for this very reason. They're quite destructive for the local wildlife.

Humans should stay inside, they are quite destructive to local wildlife.

Quite a pointless comparison.

I thought about "Flo Control": https://web.archive.org/web/20080913222639/http://www.quantu...

Glad someone else remembers Flo Control.

“We want to be the first ones to take on that challenge and have all the expertise and skill to be able to hopefully create a really wonderful product that could change other people’s lives,” says Tom Rosinski. “We’re looking at launching on August 16th, it’s a very exciting time for us.”

Well you won't be the first ones, I guess. Everything old is new again.

I thought this seemed familiar. Impressive how much more compact and elegant the new version is with modern technology.

The only thing that really makes it more compact is that flo-control used a big box and a lamp to produce an ideal and consistent input image which took a picture of the cat's head in silhouette.

Honestly, the image acquisition method that the original system used combined with a modern ml based image classifier would probably work better than just hoping your camera can see it from the front.

Can anyone with industrial knowledge explain what the use of plastic gears means for the life span of a product such as this? It's shown at timestamp 2:21 in the video in the article.

I've personally experienced and also read about plastic gears in blenders (it was mentioned here a few days ago), and they wear down quickly. But that's a much more demanding application, I would think, that this flap door.

Equating the material selection for gears in a 1500W blender vs a mechanical cat flap does not make a ton of sense. "Plastic" gears generally don't require lubrication, or can be self-lubricating or have embedded lubricants so they are often used in consumer products to avoid maintenance requirements and cost. But there also are advanced "plastics" that might roundly outperform aluminum or even steel in a gear application too. The questions isnt so much about the gear but the engineering that went into selecting it.

Unfortunately the materials choice really is often purposely manipulated to shorten lifespan, and I have direct knowledge of it happening one time. I have a friend who has his own injection molding machines and manufactures a couple of products for a popular trade brands. When he started out, he was building everything with polycarbonate. After about 2 years the brand asked him to switch to ABS because their returns under the 1 year warranty were too low. The cost difference was immaterial too; the entire decision was made to shorten the lifespan of the product. They legitimately wanted it to break out of warranty so that people would be likely to return to buy another or buy something different. Sorry don't want to name the company, but it is a respected brand.

They were right about it lasting though. I have one of the OG polycarbonate units and it's now more than 20 years old!

There's no reason they wouldn't be fine if spec'd out correctly for the conditions they'll see.

Thought this was going to be one of those cat bibs that hangs from a collar and prevents them from hunting effectively by getting in the way of their front paws

Wouldn't a bell on the collar stop the problem at the root, and be simpler?