this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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Are the electronics not in a plastic casing? Is the board exposed? Wtf?
For many consumer electronics the general design used, (because it's cheap and easy to assemble) is a PCB in a plastic clamshell sort of thing which unfortunately places the PCB right where the seam in the plastic is. Usually there's some additional geometry to prevent direct exposure. But high voltage finds a way and if there's tabs with cutouts or anything like that there often is a direct path, especially for something as thin and 'sharp' as cat fur.
That being said, it's more likely to be either the buttons, power connector, or something the designers foolishly thought of as "ground" and there not actually being an earth ground
low voltage: who here is a conductor? High voltage: Who here wants to be a conductor??
Gotta have buttons to program it. Buttons need to be on the outside.
I think there's a video somewhere where a cat just slightly pull the plug a bit so it disconnected, and release it so it reconnected, and the feeder rebooted and did the thing OOP said.
I watched too many cat video.
I could see this. I’ve had motherboards reboot from static affecting the USB ports. Could be a power button or similar that sends the shock straight to the board.
Had a flashback to that shitty PC I had as a kid where if you punched the side around the power supply, the pc would reboot.
Why were you punching the PC?
I was a dumb kid.
Because its a naughty computer in need if punishment.
Probably gaming related, keyboards and mice can only take so much rage before you need to go one up.
Have you not vented frustration on a peripheral/controller or in red blind rage turned the console/PC off?
It just makes me think of certain old crappy Sony TV production monitors that would stop working in color but if you hit them in the right place they’d work again for a little while. Sony sold the parts to fix them for more than a new monitor so a lot of stations just put them places where it didn’t matter if they were black and white instead of color.
Surely no one would just go in the Internet and lie
What actually happened was my cat brushed up against me and the static shock caused my phone to glitch a little and type up and sublime the whole post that OP screen-shotted.