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CatGenie Sells an Automated Cat Litter Box with DRM

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday December 25 2014, @06:20PM   
from the Home-of-the-Future dept.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Jorge Lopez writes that as a cat lover he's always wanted an automatic cat litter box and finally found one called the CatGenie, a fully automated self-washing litter box connected to water, electricity and the sewer that cleans itself with water and soap. "It’s the Rolls Royce of cat litter boxes, a hefty device that scoops, cleans, and disposes of the waste all on it’s own. It’s completely automated, even senses when a cat poops and cleans up afterwards." But there's trouble in paradise. "Life with the CatGenie was great, but not quite perfect," writes Lopez after discovering that CatGenie uses a smart cartridge that is only available from the manufacturer. "I found that the “Smart” in SmartCartridge is that it has an RFID chip inside of it to keep track of how much solution it has, and once it runs out, well, you can't refill. I honestly did not believe this and tore one of the cartridges apart, and there it was, looking back at me, a tiny chip holding up it’s little metal finger." Fortunately there are some amazing people helping the CatGenie community who have released products like the custom firmware CatGenious and CartridgeGenius which allows you to use whatever solution you want. "The cost savings is great, but isn't the biggest driver for me, it’s mainly the principle that I don't own the device I paid for, and I'm really tired of having cat litter everything in my home."

• Keurig coffeemaker hack? Keurig coffeemaker hack? (Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Thursday December 25 2014, @10:41PM

  by zocalo (302) on Thursday December 25 2014, @10:41PM (#129171)

  Maybe something like the Keurig coffeemaker hack would work here too. Removing a RFID from a genuine cartridge, then taping it to a fake cartridge or the device itself? If it's tracking the usage of each cartridge by its tag rather than just using them to ID genuine cartridges then you might need to cycle through a few tags before it forgets the oldest one though, although I doubt it would need too many before you could start reusing them.

  --
  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Ink cartridges (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 25 2014, @11:49PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 25 2014, @11:49PM (#129185)

  Chipped printer ink cartridges might be a better analogy.
  The things would record (poorly) what flowed out.
  One trick, apparently, was to continually swap out partially-used cartridges.
  Perhaps someone will discover a similar "hack" for the DRM'd litter box.
  (I never bought into the inkjet scam, so any insight I have there is second-hand.)

  -- gewg_

  Parent