Fixing the Litter-Robot’s SmartScale weight tracking with Home Assistant

My two cats recently acquired a Litter-Robot 4 , and are now using it mostly full time after a few weeks of transition.

Apart from promising to save precious manual scooping energy, shielding from the smell of the cats expertly timing their bowel movements with dinner time, the Litter-Robot 4 boasts a “SmartScale®” .

The SmartScale® promises, through an advanced algorithm to identify which cat is using the litter when, track their weight through time, and bathroom habits.

As silly as the need for tracking these metrics on a cat sounds, they were actually a pretty big selling point for us:

• Cat 1 has a history of urinary tract issues (which apparently is common for male ginger cats), which tends to manifest itself with him visiting the litter an unusual number of times (as he is unable to actually urinate).
• Cat 2 is picky, and will pee on anything but litter if the box is not clean enough. This is mostly handled by the robot’s autocleaning, but keeping track of his bathroom visits (or lack thereof) should warn us of a possible incident.

After a few days of usage however, I was disappointed to notice that the SmartScale® is not actually that smart. To Litter-Robot’s own admission, “Cats within 1 pound of each other may register incorrectly ”.

As a casual home-assistant user, I built litter-ha-DumbScale , which relies on the Litter-Robot integration. SmartScale®’s ‘advanced algorithm’ is apparently too clever for its own good. DumbScale does the obvious thing: compare the current weight to each cat’s last recorded weight, assign the visit to the closest match, and update accordingly.

There will still be limitations with cats that are very close in weight, especially as the scale doesn’t appear to be of great accuracy, but this has worked well for me so far (Cat 1 and Cat 2’s weight differ by slightly less than a pound).

I must also say that as Litter-Robot mentions here , the cat detection does get better with time, and after a few weeks I see less cat confusion.

There are also other issues where the SmartScale® will just skip attribution of box usage like these, which DumbScale fixes as well.

A month in, DumbScale hasn’t misattributed a single visit. If you’re running into the same issues, the repo has everything you need to set it up.