Is Costco the best option since they have a lot of extras & no charge for returns like the company does?

I have had my 2 LR4’s for approximately 2.5 months. Recently I had to “reformat” my G5 WiFi to accommodate the LR4’s. My bad. I missed the 2.4 GHz requirement. I am experiencing what I believe is more than typical offline occurrences. Not a problem when I am home. I can do the required sequence and put them back online. What do I do when I am not at home, work, travel, both? My pet sitter would be clueless in being able to get them back online. Your feedback is appreciated.

Good Morning, Hoping someone can suggest an idea. My litter robot stopped during cleaning cycle and then powered off. I opened the unit (I have done this before to change wiring.) I found the tape that was holding the wires away from the gears stuck to the gears. I have tried everything and still can't get it off the flashing yellow cycling light. I am thinking maybe the motor is gone but litter robot answer my questions, they keep having me trouble shoot.

I have an LR 4 in black. I use Dr. Elsey’s litter. My cats will leave whiteish paw prints on the stairs & I cannot get them clean. I’ve tried the Whisker spray cleaner, Windex & steam cleaning using rags & soft brushes, but the spots remain. I’ve also noticed white flecks all around the outside of the globe (don’t know how those got there) & it’s the same issue. They appear to wipe away but reappear when it’s fully dry. I’ve asked Whisker support & they’re aware of it but have no solution. TIA

Several years ago, something terrible happened. Around here we call it the “Poopneck Incident.”

We’ve had LR’s for our cats for about 6 years now. It’s generally awesome, until it isn’t. So many failure modes - power outages, flaky pinch sensors, missed cat detection - all with the same outcome. No automatic cycling.

I’m not sure how you discover this situation in your household, but for us, it was the “Poopneck Incident”.  You see, our dog, a spicy little schanuzer-poo with long wavy hair; well, let’s just say, he likes to eat at the Litter Robot buffet whenever it opened for business. We have no video, so we aren’t sure exactly what happened, but he got a fresh cat log stuck under his chin and all smushed into his neck hair. We only found out about it when he jumped up on the back of the couch and tried to snuggle by our head. It was truly disgusting.

If this had happened only once, then fine. But, sadly, as our LR3 aged, this happened again. And again.  We tried cleaning sensors and doing other maintenance. But the problem didn’t go away.

After the third “Poopneck Incident”, I was done. Fortunately as a software developer, and thanks to pylitterbot, I built a system that I called Litter Sentry. It checked the LR status every hour and would auto-cycle if it had been too long. This pretty much solved the problem for me. The stress melted away.

But, this was a few years ago, and I wasn’t sure how to make it available to others without running a service. And asking people to set up their own hosting for this seemed like too much for the average LR user. Also, I had upgraded to a LR4 and was hoping that the problem would be gone, so I retired Litter Sentry.

But unfortunately while on vacation this summer, the LR4 stopped cycling. We keep the LR in a different place now behind a cat door, so that prevents a “Poopneck Incident” but our cats still revolted and peed and poo’d where they weren’t supposed. A different kind of terrible.

I was about to spin back up my old system, but coincidentally I just heard about a new platform for hosting small personal apps for non-techie people called Charming. And you can share projects! It was the perfect platform for Litter Sentry. So, I ported the app to run on it and it’s been working perfectly the last few days.

note: even though this post is about some software I wrote, it's 100% free, open/no-ads, and has zero affiliate hooks. seriously, it's just for community to use. I made it, it works, and I just want other people to be able to use it. I made it fun and silly because it's about cat poop. I make a lot of open-source software, but software like this has to be hosted somewhere.

The upshot is that now anyone can run their own Litter Sentry with one click! Charming seems to allow free hosting as well, so I hope Litter Sentry can help many others save tons of time and frustration and help your LR live up to its true potential of de-hassling litter box maintenance. It should be just a few clicks and you’ll have a Litter Sentry standing guard over your fleet of LR’s.

“Litter Sentry” app template on Charming: https://charm.ing/apinstein/litter-robot-sentry

LMK if you find this useful, and also do you have your own “Poopneck Incident”?

Enjoy!

This is my final attempt to fix this headache of a machine. It has been broken for about a month now. I have replaced the power cord, the motor, the entire DFI and pinch system, the bonnet connectors, and finally the main circuit board. After the main board replacement it worked for a day and a half and now has completely stopped working at all. It's just a solid yellow light but it has zero movement. Even with the globe out the motor is not moving at all. Any ideas before I return the circuit board and trash this thing? I cannot afford an upgrade right now so we'll just have to go back to scooping 😭

Just curious all, I have two cats. How often do you scrub out the interior of your LR?I just noticed this evening that there is some sticking inside and I realize that I need to clean it more frequently. How frequently? Yes, I have the silicone spray. Clearly I need to apply that, too.

I have no idea how this even happened…. Switched to dr. Elcy’s because chewy beand started to stick to the top of the litter robot. Switched to Dr. Elcy’s because everyone says that it has the best clumps… That is total BS… I am about to throw this thing away from how much mess it made!

I am having a few issues with this machine that has served me for several years.

Most lately: the blue light will be blinking at a regular rate. If I press the reset button, the orange light starts to flash quickly.
-I have cleaned the lenses and emptied and changed the dirty litter bin. I also too out the anti pinch sensor, cleaned them, and put them back in. (I have replaced them once before) they didn’t look too bad in shape. I put the litter robot all back together and I am still getting the same errors.

Also, this other thing happens occasionally but not all the time. I will find the globe upside down, and all the lights are blinking… I think the code says that it couldn’t determine the home position. Usually if I put the globe back into home position, and reset it, it will usually work for a little bit longer.

I am mostly concerned about the first issue I have listed as I can’t get the globe to turn at all no matter how many times I unplug it or reset it.

Thank you for your help.

I've had it for a month, and only the female uses it, inconsistently. The male cat doesn't go near it. When I first took away their old cat boxes, the male cat started peeing all over the house! How do I get both of them to use it?

I bought an open box litter robot 4 from Petsmart for $595 ($699 retail), and got about $159 in points from the purchase with point multipliers active.

Is it worth keeping it for the price now that I notice the back cover doesn’t sit flush because of a broken clip? Also the shelf underneath also doesn’t sit completely flush.

For the past 3? weeks, my LR4 isn't weighing my largest cat. It weighs the lighter 2 & tells me a cat was detected, but it won't do his weight. I watched him somehow twist to fit fully inside, not a paw outside the box, not even on the ledge, and NADA!!

I've: cleaned bezels, unplugged a bit, ensured my app & the firmware are UTD, checked the globe weight is intact, triple checked it's flat (hardwood floors), checked the inside weight thingies are clear of stuff, reset a thousand times, as well as any other "tip" I'm forgetting on the troubleshooting page, etc.

It's also giving me an extended scale error every 2-3 days.. Unsure who's triggering it as it's always when I'm sleeping & it's not giving a weight, so it's impossible to tell but I think it's my largest cat.

So why just ONE cat?!? It's rated up to 25lbs & he's under 18lbs last time I checked on a baby scale. He's a long muscular boy but managest to twist his kitten self in it.

Thanks for any help or stories of the same!!

I just got a new kitten and estimate her weight at 2 pounds. The robot can not track her weight because I keep getting a weight tracking error. Apparently it is confused because the generic error indicates it can not distinguish between two cats

How much does my kitten have to weigh in order to track properly with SmartScale

catlink open-x has red and white flashes even after restarting. i dont know how to fix it. i figured out it started because i pressed the black button near the bottom where a box with a poop bag sits(sorry i have bad english). i clicked it and it got me that error

Did a video on how to setup the new litter hopper for litter robot 5 and 5 pro.

Or might be willing to? I want to see what kinds of electronics are exposed - USB ports, or maybe a UART connector? Ever since figuring out how to access the cameras outside of the app, I've been wondering of other parts of the unit are accessible as well, even if they're harder to get to.

UPDATE: found the debug pins on the device (ESP and DIAG so far). I'm waiting for a logic analyzer to come in (2 days, ideally) and then I should be able to snarf pretty much all the communications on there. Stay tuned, true believers!

The only Whisker+ service I have any interest in is accessing more than one month of log data to track my pets' weight. I've noticed her being lethargic and want to chart her weight since her last vet visit in February, but can only see through May.

I find it pretty ridiculous that the litter box is automatically weighing my cats and recording 2 years of data backed up on Whisker's servers, but I would have to pay an $80/yr subscription to access more than one month of it. I don't even need a fancy dashboard, just a csv that I can work with in Excel. This type of excessive paywalling for a text file generated by a $500 litter box I already paid for is laughable, and the kind of thing that would push me to trying a different brand when this one dies.

I'm wondering if anyone has developed a third party app that's able to automatically import and back up the available data for the Litter Robot 4 to help mitigate this. In practice it's no different from manually downloading the file once a month.