June 2023 edit: There's now been a Zigbee2MQTT update that fixes most of the issues I noted below. The clock is now in my local time and the default button to feed in Home Assistant works (little awkwardly, using a dropdown instead of a button but that's fine). Also the schedule shows in the settings normally! I updated to five stars.
There are three ways you can set this thing up
1. Aqara Hub + Aqara app to manage feeding schedules. Easiest out of the box solution. This is what the instructions say and what it pretends to only support. Depends on the cloud which is a non-starter for me
2. ZHA with a Zigbee dongle in Home Assistant, managing feeding schedules through normal HA automations. This is what most reviewers seem to be opting for. This is not my method because 1) I have opted for Zigbee2MQTT over ZHA and MOST IMPORTANTLY 2) This method means the feeding is directly dependent on Home Assistant being available. This is what I normally do for other devices but I really don't like the idea of my cat being hungry because my server is down or the automation bugged out. Other reviews have stated that it's not possible at this time to publish the schedule to the feeder through ZHA and have it work on its own. Hopefully there's an update in the future to fix that.
3. Zigbee2MQTT with a Zigbee dongle linked to Home Assistant. This is my method, and I chose it because I already use Z2M, but most importantly because as stated in option 2, the feeding schedule will continue working if my HA is down because the schedule is a state that is saved to the feeder itself. Z2M supports publishing a new schedule to it unlike ZHA (at the time of this review). My review is based on this method since I know many others use it too.
For the janky stuff:
* [Fixed in June 2023] The internal clock is in UTC. You need to account for this when creating the schedule. It seems that using the Aqara Hub method lets you change the time zone, but at this time Z2M does not. No review states this so I only found out after thinking the schedule wasn't working but my cat had actually already eaten :) this isn't a huge deal except that the "portions per day" and "weight per day" sensors reset at midnight, which for me in EST is actually 8pm. Minor annoyance as it means those stats are mostly useless if I want to graph them in Home Assistant
* [Fixed in June 2023] In Z2M, the manual "feed: START" button is a button, but in HA it's a "selector" drop down with only "START" as a default option, so it doesn't do anything. I can't access Z2M from outside my house at this time without a VPN so out of the box I can't start a manual feeding from HA. I had to instead make a script in HA which sends the {"feed": "START"} payload to MQTT, and then in a dashboard I made a button to activate that script. Now it works! (screenshots attached)
* Because HA is just reading the "schedule" from MQTT, it just shows up as one big JSON blurb instead of a concise schedule
* [Fixed in June 2023] The schedule in Z2M shows as multiple blank feedings until you look at the state which actually describes them. You have to use the state to know which blank feeding is which.
