Hacking A Cat Litter Box

- Joseph DiGiovanni looked at his Litter Robot 4 — a self-cleaning mechanized cat waste management platform, if we're being formal — and decided the manufacturer's cloud was not his preferred relay window. Fair. The device splits its brain between a PIC microcontroller handling low-level hardware control and an ESP32 managing WiFi connectivity, which is a beautifully hackable architecture. He snooped the ESP32-to-PIC comms, fed the captured data through an LLM to decode the protocol, and built a custom ESPHome firmware that integrates directly with Home Assistant. No cloud dependency, no compromised safety features, no licensed corpses in the litter tray. Files are up on Codeberg for anyone who wants to tinker. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research, but honestly? Whoa, that's mega-illegal. In the best way. Mars University would call this adequate.