Petlibro Local

Control a Petlibro PLAF103 pet feeder from Home Assistant over your own MQTT broker, with no vendor cloud involved.

The feeder speaks plaintext MQTT 3.1 on port 1883 with static credentials and no per-device authorisation, so a DNS rewrite for mqtt.us.petlibro.com pointing at your own broker is enough to take it over completely. This integration implements the broker side of that protocol on top of Home Assistant's built-in MQTT integration, so it reuses HA's existing broker connection rather than opening its own.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Petlibro. Reverse engineered from traffic captured on my own device, on my own network.

What you get

Entity	Platform	Mechanism
Indicator Lights	light	ATTR_SET_SERVICE / lightSwitch
Hardware Button Lock	switch	ATTR_SET_SERVICE / disableHardwareButton
Sound	switch	ATTR_SET_SERVICE / soundSwitch
Feed	button	MANUAL_FEEDING_SERVICE, one portion
Reboot	button	DEVICE_REBOOT (never observed on the wire — unverified)
Grain Dispensed	event	fires once per dispense, on GRAIN_END
Last cleaned	sensor	timestamp, Home Assistant side, survives restarts
Last refill	sensor	timestamp, Home Assistant side, survives restarts
Mark cleaned / Mark refilled	button	stamps the matching sensor with now

The feeder itself reports nothing about cleaning or refilling, so those four are bookkeeping. The sensors are read-only and carry the timestamp device class, so the frontend shows them as "3 days ago"; pressing the matching button is the only thing that moves them. They survive restarts and stay available while the feeder is offline — you clean it with the power off.

The Grain Dispensed event carries portions, expected_portions, short_fed (a dispense that fell short means the hopper jammed or ran empty), feed_type (1 scheduled, 2 manual) and plan_id.

Requirements

• Home Assistant 2024.7 or newer with the MQTT integration already set up
• An MQTT broker on your LAN listening on port 1883 — the port is fixed in the feeder's firmware
• A DNS rewrite on your router pointing mqtt.us.petlibro.com at that broker
• The feeder's serial number, printed on the device and on the box (it is also the MQTT client ID)

Installation

HACS (custom repository)

1. HACS → ⋮ → Custom repositories
2. Repository: https://github.com/j4n-e4t/petlibro_local, category: Integration
3. Install Petlibro Local, then restart Home Assistant
4. Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → Petlibro Local

Manual

Copy custom_components/petlibro_local into your Home Assistant config/custom_components/ directory and restart.

Configuration

The config flow asks for the model (PLAF103), the serial number, and an optional name. All MQTT topics are derived from those:

dl/<model>/<serial>/device/service/sub     commands out
dl/<model>/<serial>/device/event/post      events in
dl/<model>/<serial>/device/event/sub       event acks out
dl/<model>/<serial>/device/heart/post      heartbeat in
dl/<model>/<serial>/device/ntp/post        time requests in
dl/<model>/<serial>/device/ntp/sub         time replies out
dl/<model>/<serial>/device/service/post    command acks in

Answering the device

The feeder publishes at QoS 1 and retries every event until something acknowledges it, and keeps asking for the time until something answers. A broker that only listens will make it republish forever. This integration plays the part the vendor cloud used to:

• acks every event on device/event/sub with code: 0, retransmissions included
• answers NTP on device/ntp/sub with the current time and your HA time zone's UTC offset
• watches device/service/post for the device's verdict on commands we send, so a command that does not land raises an error instead of silently doing nothing

Options

Answer to feeding schedule requests — on boot the feeder asks the broker what its schedule should be (GET_FEEDING_PLAN_EVENT) and will keep asking until answered. An empty plans array is an answer, not an acknowledgement: it erases the schedule stored on the device.

• Acknowledge only (default) — answers with a bare code: 0 and leaves the on-device schedule alone.
• Clear the device schedule — sends plans: [], so only Home Assistant ever feeds the device. Choose this if you drive feeding from HA automations and do not want the feeder dispensing on its own.

Actions

petlibro_local.feed — dispense a number of portions:

action: petlibro_local.feed
target:
  device_id: <device>
data:
  portions: 2

petlibro_local.send_command — raw escape hatch onto the command topic, for protocol poking from Developer Tools:

action: petlibro_local.send_command
target:
  device_id: <device>
data:
  cmd: ATTR_SET_SERVICE
  payload:
    volume: 30
  wait_for_ack: true

cmd and ts/msgId are filled in for you. With wait_for_ack on (the default) the action fails if the device does not acknowledge within 8 seconds; turn it off for commands the device cannot answer, such as DEVICE_REBOOT.

Troubleshooting

Every device entity goes unavailable after 210 seconds without a message. The feeder heartbeats about once a minute, so unavailable means it is genuinely not talking to your broker — check the DNS rewrite, that the broker is on 1883, and power-cycle the feeder so it re-resolves the hostname.

Watch the traffic:

$ mosquitto_sub -h <broker> -v -t 'dl/PLAF103/#'

Turn on debug logging:

logger:
  logs:
    custom_components.petlibro_local: debug

Icon

HACS serves the integration's icon from custom_components/petlibro_local/brand/, so it shows up as soon as the integration is installed — no external submission needed.

Home Assistant core resolves icons from home-assistant/brands instead. The identical files under brands/custom_integrations/petlibro_local/ are sized to that repository's spec (256×256 and 512×512, square, transparent) and ready to drop into a PR there, which is what makes the icon appear outside HACS too.

icon.png / [email protected] are the two-tone original. icon-monochrome-alt.png / [email protected] are a single-colour variant — the original's dark grey mark has very little contrast on Home Assistant's dark theme, and neither HACS nor brands supports per-theme variants, so swap in the monochrome pair if that bothers you.

Entity and action icons come from icons.json and need nothing external.

Translations

English and German. A custom integration loads custom_components/petlibro_local/translations/ at runtime and never reads strings.json, which is only the source file, so the two are kept identical and CI fails if they drift — otherwise entity names silently collapse to the bare device name.

Protocol notes

A full write-up of the capture setup and the protocol — topic layout, every observed command, and which payloads are confirmed on the wire versus inferred — lives in WRITEUP.md in the mqtt_bridge research repo alongside the packet captures it is based on.

License

MIT