Reprogramming pet finder. Is it possible?

I had the same pet feeder and love the tinkerer mindset! If the system was set up well, even if you can reverse engineer the API that's being called to trigger changes on the machine, it will be impossible to call. e.g. if they're using an encrypted connection and the company has the private key then something you can do without modifying the code running on the machine itself. You we need to exploit a weakness of vulnerability in the system. Like if there's some hidden debugging feature that can tell the device to use a test server instead of their production server and you can run a server yourself and redirect the traffic there, and then fake responses according to the reversed engineered api. This is kind of a fun problem to think about. I would probably try to focus on replacing the motor with a different one I can control via another mechanism.

Threw it out :(. I was very early on with their V1, so they had already sent me a free upgraded version at some point, and I just cut my losses and threw it out when they shut down.