Hello,
I’ve set up some Mi Flora sensor in my HA configuration.
Unfortunately my plants aren’t so close to my Raspberry PI that I use as BT Interface so, especially with the warm season coming, I lost the BT connection losing in the info about the plant.
I was wondering if there was any BT extender/repeater that could suit my needs or if there is any other strategy to connect far plant to my HA installation.
Thanks
M.
I would be interested to know the answer too. Have the same issue and only thing I’ve read is external Bluetooth usb…
There used to be a USB to BT gateway on Amazon that had a long range BT antenna. Mixed reviews if it worked or not; but several claimed it gave them several times the rPI built in BT range.
So I’d look along those lines first.
If not a BT to MQTT type gateway to get something closer to your plants to speak BT and then use WIFI or ethernet to get the data back to HA. Powerline ethernet also could work here.
I found an article in Italian which explain how to use a Raspberry Pi zero as bridge between BLE and MQTT via WiFi. It could be interesting as long as you can feed power to the Pi Zero…
I used this, works perfectly!
I fund other docs…
It looks that it is pretty useless try to increase BT range using more powerful BT device at one side only. BT devices mainly belong to three class where the first has its maximum operating range at 100 meters but this is true only if you have class 1 BT devices at both ends.
Because it is not possible to change BT in MI Flora we can only follow the way to convert BT to MQTT over WiFi.
[https://github.com/zewelor/bt-mqtt-gateway]
I use this for far away bt-ble thermostats on a pi zero, works perfectly.
After some weeks of test I’bound to say that using other Zigbee powered devices such as smart plug/switches solved 90% of my range issues.
Despite this I still have a last problem only: I placed a water sensor in a little well where I have a tank with a submerged pump. If the pump stops to works the water overflow flooding the surface where there is the sensor. Unfortunately the well has concrete wall so the radio signal struggles passing through. So, from time to time I lost the water sensor signal which become “unavailable”.
In that room, where there is the well, I put two star plugs but the signal is not as strong as required.
Is there any other devices that could help me in this particular room/case compatible with deCONZ?
Thank You for your suggestions
Regards
Mauro
Hi Martin
Let me get this right are you saying that the pi zero is working as the bridge to extend the BLE range.
Thanks for your post
Nick
I use an esp32 running esphome which talks to the mifloras. It’s outside in a weather proof box. It pushes the data back to HA via mqtt or via the esphome integration.
Great Thanks Dan
Hello @sh00t2kill I’m interested in esp32 platform.
I read the esp32 home site but I didn’t catch how to install a firmware for the first time.
Could you tell me where I can find some info about this?
Thank You
Getting started guides are here:
They explain the process better than I could. I use the command line method rather than hassio
Looking to extend the bluetooth range on a rpi 3 as well. Anyone else was successful in setting the bt-mqtt-gateway up?
You can try using long range dongles with external antennas
This being said, Mi Floras have such a short range that i gave up shortly after purchasing few of them.
Hmm. I just installed a Switchbox Meter suggested by this post using this github sbm2mqtt only to find out that the temperature gauge is out of range from where I would like to place it.
How much added range did it provide after installing the dongle for you? I am thinking of moving the rpi closer, but it does require a bit of work since I have to detach the rpi from it’s cluster.
Hi. Im not sure how much added range it provided, as i originally had LM1010 for my RPi so never used a different dongle.
This being said, you cannot just look at dongle max signal distance - BT is two way communication so it relies on both transcievers in same degree - in reality a good dongle with a good external antenna may extend your range by more like 10-25% than 10 times (unless you’re using good dongles with external antennas on both sides of transmission)
Someone tries this? Maybe it’s enough 
