Bluetooth on an Intel NUC with Hassio for Mi Flora

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi,

I’m hoping someone has some experience they can share in getting a Mi Flora plant sensor working on an Intel NUC / Hass.io build. In particular, I’m having trouble running the hcitool to discover the sensor’s bluetooth MAC address.

The closest I have got is running hcitool inside the home assistant container:

nick@mars:~$ docker exec -ti homeassistant bash
bash-5.0# hcitool lescan
Could not open device: No such device
bash-5.0# hcitool dev
Devices:

Neither my Debian host nor the HA supervisor seem to have hcitool or bluetoothctl present.

The Mi Flora description is somewhat unclear about my situation. The guide notes that:

Now I’m not too sure which one I am: mine is a Hass.io build, but perhaps I fall into the “generic Docker installation” category. Because I used the Hass.io build script, I have no idea whether --net=host has been configured. And I don’t know what “properly configured Bluetooth on the host” actually means.

I have successfully used bluetooth on my system before - at one stage I had the flicd add-on configured (which I have since disabled as I am no longer using flicd). As mentioned, my build is on an Intel NUC, upon which I have deployed Debian and built the Hass.io docker image per the guide.

So I am hoping someone has experience either running a Mi Flora sensor on an Intel NUC based Hass.io build and / or with configuring bluetooth / running hcitool on a NUC / Hass.io build.

Many thanks in advance.

2

Same issues. does anyone have experience with NUC based hass.io build?

3

So I did figure this out - I was over-thinking it. The standard Debian build provides everything that Home Assistant needs to work with the Mi Flora sensor, but not enough to do the bluetooth scan. I found that bluez worked, but hcitool did not. Here’s what I did (from the Debian host, MAC addresses partially redacted):

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install bluez
$ sudo bluetoothctl
Agent registered
[bluetooth]# scan on
Discovery started
[CHG] Controller 04:xx:xx:xx:xx:3A Discovering: yes
[CHG] Controller 04:xx:xx:xx:xx:3A Class: 0x00000000
[CHG] Controller 04:xx:xx:xx:xx:3A Powered: no
[CHG] Controller 04:xx:xx:xx:xx:3A Discovering: no
[CHG] Controller 04:xx:xx:xx:xx:3A Class: 0x00000104
[CHG] Controller 04:xx:xx:xx:xx:3A Powered: yes
[bluetooth]# scan on
Discovery started
[CHG] Controller04:xx:xx:xx:xx:3ADiscovering: yes
[NEW] Device <redacted>
[NEW] Device <redacted>
[NEW] Device <redacted>
[NEW] Device <redacted>
[NEW] Device <redacted>
[NEW] Device <redacted>
[NEW] Device 80:xx:xx:xx:xx:D2 Flower care

Then configured Mi Flora with the discovered MAC address:

sensor:
  - platform: miflora
    mac: '80:xx:xx:xx:xx:D2'
    name: big_green

plant:
  big_green:
    sensors:
      moisture: sensor.big_green_moisture
      battery: sensor.big_green_battery
      temperature: sensor.big_green_temperature
      conductivity: sensor.big_green_conductivity
      brightness: sensor.big_green_light_intensity

Hope that helps!

1 Like
4

Thanks! Seems to have resolved my issues. Before it would only update for short period after restarting HA but has been rock solid using bluez