Anyone used a plant sensor other than Xaiomi?

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It is now integrated into the development branch and also V0.9.3, you can take it there:

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Thanks! I need to have a read through as none of that makes sense to me at the moment. Just to check I am on the right thought process OpenMQTT Gateway goes on my esp32 chip?

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Yes, you should upload OpenMQTTGateway to an ESP32 and it will publish the sensors data to an MQTT server.

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How are the Grow Care Garden sensors working for everyone so far?

I have recharged the batteries once already. This is a bit puzzling to me. Compared to the small sensors where is all that power used?
It cant be the beacons because it broadcasts way less frequently than the small ones.

2 of the 3 I got only show 0% moisture all the time now.

2 of them are not able to finish syncing in the vegtrug app.

Seems there’s been a little confusion which is the Grow Care Garden as compared to the smaller one so just including a picture.

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Must admit I’ve not had a chance to progress this. Don’t entirely understand the mqtt / esp upload bits so need some time to look at it

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I’m thinking about buying a few of these. I read it works with this integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mitemp_bt/ is that right?

Also - in your photo, the veg trug is on the right, what is on the left?

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You can only connect one device by Bluetooth so the link you’ve post will only work with one vegtrug hence trying to find another solution

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Is the fact that it can only connect to one device specific to the vegtrug? I’m using two other BLE thermometers with the mitemp_bt component and they work great.

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@mattvolp
I currently use https://github.com/custom-components/sensor.mitemp_bt and I have not noticed any limitations with that one. I have 40 plant sensors in total, both Mi Flora and VegTrug branded.

Actually both of those sensors come with the VegTrug brand. The small one is 100% identical to the Mi Flora as far as I can tell, even the ios Flower Care app does not distinguish between them. Curiously the Flower Care app also work with the Garden sensor and uses the correct thumbnail icon, although it is still just called “Flower Care”.
The VegTrug branded “Mi Flora” sensor they call “VegTrug Grow Care Home”, and the big one is “VegTrug Grow Care Garden”. They also have their own VegTrug ios app which is almost identical to the Flower Care app. Any sensor you add to one app will show up in the other app. I also discovered that two additional companies sell/sold the small sensors and also have their own ios apps. Same app/sensor, different brands.

I like the idea of the Garden sensor and I might buy more myself, although the price is pretty steep, if you can even find them anywhere. And even though they work or should work with very minor updates with any repo that works with the Mi Flora sensors, they do not behave exactly like them. There are a few … dissapointments IMO: https://github.com/open-homeautomation/miflora/issues/138#issuecomment-583677622

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Oh ok that’s good then! Why was I trying to get it to work through mqtt then and not just ble al the while!?

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All very useful info, thanks.

Also, you have a lot of plants!

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Got myself some time to do this tomorrow.

I have only used areduino and an esp once. I am assuming i follow these steps:

https://docs.openmqttgateway.com/upload/arduino-ide.html

But not really sure what settings I need to change after this? It talks about pin outs etc which is way beyond me currently.

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You are going to upload on an ESP32 or another board?

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Yep esp32’s

I assume I don’t need to worry about all the pages of how to breadboard an esp to something else etc?

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Not with ESP32 if you need only to get bluetooth data

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ok, so I have downloaded openmqttgateway, opened the main.ino file.
I have also downloaded [esp32dev-ble-libraries.zip] and added the zip file to my libraries folder in Arduino.

The only change I have made to the main.ino file is to take // off the line that says #define Zgateway BT

I have then done verifty and I get a message saying Wifimanager.h no such file or directory
If I go to sketch - include library - add .zip library and browse to esp32dev-ble it gives an error saying:

specified folder/zip file does not contain a valid library

So I am now stuck. It will be something I am not doing, but as said, very new to this so not sure what.

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OK think I am through that issue, the zipped library was renaming itself when extracting on mac.

Next issue is I get to DynamicJsonBuffer jsonBuffer;

And get the error “is a class from ArduinoJson 5.”
So I went back and installed 5 instead of 6.

The next issue I got was class BLEAdvertisedDevice has no member named ‘getServiceDataCount’

Sorry, I know this is painful, but I am trying to learn

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I think this is something to do with the libraries. But I downloaded your esp32dev-ble-libraries.zip but when I now open Arduino it says the ESP32 BLE Arduino library cannot be used as it should not have spaces / max length 63 characters.

Should I need to rename this folder within esp32dev-ble-libraries?

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Here is a short procedure,

If uploaded connect to the wifi AP of the board and set your credentials

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Amazing! Thank you so much for the time you have taken to do this!

You will be please to know I have managed to get my ESP32 compiled and connected to my network using the network manager.

You will be sad to hear I now have more problems or at least questions.

I can see a device called espressif connected to my wifi now which is the ESP32
My MQTT server is mosquitto running on a synology NAS on my network so running commands or seeing that it is in my broker I am not sure how to do.

I tried setting HA to listen to home/OpenMQTTGateway but would have thought I needed to set the mac addresses of the vegtrug sensors somewhere?

Sorry for more questions but thanks for the amazing help so far.