I just got 3 LoraWAN Soil Sensors from Makerfabs which seem to be a slightly different version as they are maketed with as LoraWAN instead of simple Lora.
LoRaWAN New Temperature/ Humidity/ Soil Moisture Sensor Gen2
LoRaWAN® Soil Moisture Sensor Instruction Manual
As all necessary device data (LoRaWAN DEV EUI/ APP EUI/ APP Key) is printed on a sticker i got the device integrated into Helium network (TTN doesnt have enough network nodes around here…).
The firmware is premade with no info how to alter or compile yourself but this is fine for me. For 15$/€ it looks like a solid sensor so far, esp. with the casing i 3dprinted.
As i cannot use “The Things Network” but Helium, getting data into HA looks more difficult. Right now my path looks like:
Helium (HeyIoT Console/Chirpstack)->Datacake->Node Red (local)->MQTT-> homeassistant.