I have a Xiaomi Mi Flora plantsensor which is downstairs while my HA running on a Raspberry Pi 4 is running upstairs. The plant sensor is barely detected by the RPi (about -80dBm or lower) and loses connection every now and then, so I installed a Bluetooth proxy and put it near the plant sensor. This works fine as long as the RPi is unable to see the plant sensor, but when it does, it takes priority and I’m stuck with the plantsensor running on the internal RPi BT. It seems HA is combining the two connections into one device. Is there a way to stop this de-duplication of Bluetooth devices, so I can disable the device connected to the internal BT so it’s forced via the BT proxy? Or is there another way around this behaviour?
That all happens behind the scenes and I’m not aware of any way to change it.
I have a number of Mi Floras as well, many of which use a BT Proxy to connect. They seem to particularly struggle with poor connections, as I have several quite close to a BT Proxy and they still struggle to maintain a reliable connection. Luckily they still report back often enough, especially since it’s a plant so nothing is changing rapidly (outside of right after I water them).
Do not worry about it. Your plant sensor will broadcast BLE data regularly, and both the dongle + the proxy will relay whatever messages it sends. HA will then deduplicate the messages — this is by design — and process each individual deduplicated message as a single information packet.