She's got it!

Yes, Basti has figured out how the feeder works! How I know? Well, one morning I came downstairs and her food bowl was empty. And I was absolutely sure that when I went to bed, there was food still in her bowl. This basically means two good things: one, she knows how to operate the feeder and isn't afraid of it anymore and two, (and that is a huge accomplishment), she will eat when we're not around! Since then, we've heard her eat while standing in the kitchen and we're out of sight. So no more 'holding her paw' when she eats and we can leave the house for more than a few hours at a time. I do so love technology! Below the video of how she does it; I've fast-forwarded the part where she's eating because it's not the most interesting part of the video.

There was one strange occurance and I think Basti knew before we did; that bright light close by the feeder will actually confuse the chip scanner and cause the feeder to stay closed. A few weeks back, we noticed that during the day Basti would go up to the feeder and it would open, but in the evening, she would go up to it and simply wait for us to open it for her. Initially, that was puzzling us: why wouldn't she try? When we realized she had been eating at night, the only difference between day, night and evening was that in the evening, we turned on the lamp that stood nearby...so that had to be the cause. When we switched lamps, Basti quickly realized that she didn't need to wait for us anymore and now everything is working smoothly. Mission accomplished!

Yet another try

After months of trying to get Basti in the box by means of the microchip cat flap, I had to admit defeat. We got as far as closing the lid on her after she had jumped in and letting her get out through the cat flap by herself but that usually freaked her out anyway. We needed to find a way to make her go through the flap by herself but something seemed off. Like it wasn't working properly. We started making plans to try and adjust the cat flap so that it could be plugged in, in stead of working on batteries. We would then try to cover the sensor so that the scanner would work constantly and we hoped that this would make it easier for the scanner to pick up on Basti's chip. Up until that point, Basti has to stick her head in almost all the way, and she wasn't going for it.

Blinky checking it out

My husband was trying all sorts of options to change from batteries to an outlet situation but the voltage was giving him a hard time. At one point I suggested contacting the manufacturer of the cat flap to see if they could help and when I went to the website of the manufacturer, we saw another product they had come up with; the Surefeed. https://www.sureflap.com/en-gb/pet-feeder/microchip-pet-feeder

From the moment I saw it, I was almost sure that that would be a much simpler solution so we bought it. Of course, I had to change everything at the same time. We put the feeder on top of the box; we turned the box 90 degrees so it would take up less room in the living room and we changed the brand of petfood again... I tend to do stupid things like that. Blinky was very interested from the get-go and had no problems with the change...Basti on the other hand was not amused and initially wouldn't cooperate

Basti eating from the Surefeed.

A couple of things were annoying her. The noise of the lid opening and closing freaked her out. Plus, having the curved sensor above her head, wasn't something she particularly liked. I had also positioned the feeder so that she couldn't see if my other cats were coming up to her so she would look up every 2 or 3 seconds to see what was going on and that didn't work. After a week or so, I changed the box back to its original setting and put the feeder in such a position that she would be able to look into the living room and see every cat that would try to approach. That seemed to do the trick and she started  to get less freaked out. About a third of the time, she still doesn't stick her head in far enough to open the feeder but during the rest of the day, she does and it opens by itself. Every time that happens, we praise the living daylights out of her :-)...She still wants me or my husband  nearby when she eats (a tricky side effect from when she wasn't eating and I dragged the food to her and stayed while she ate) but I'm having high hopes!