Hi all,
I plan to buy some MiFlora plant sensors.
I understand that those sensors are connected to my Home Assistant Pi through bluetooth. Can somebody tell me the ~ range of those devices? What can I do for plants that are too far away from my Home Assistant Pi? Can I use a Pi Zero or something to connect them and forward data to Home Assistant?
You can use an ESP32 board as the sensor to wifi gateway.
The range is what you’d expect for Bluetooth. 10m or so.
Cool.
So a single ESP32 board will be connected to each plant sensor and they can then use WiFi if I got that right?
No that can’t be right I think… 
Can you explain alittle bit further how the ESP32 comes into play here?
The ESP board listens for Bluetooth broadcasts from the mi floras and sends the information on to home assistant via wifi and the esphome api.
Ah cool, so I could just put one ESP board in a room for example.
Thank you!
another option is run plantgateway on some raspberry pi zero’s within range of the sensors. (I crrently have 3 as I have a long house with 2 storeys)…
This will then get the data via BLE and then send them to HA using MQTT… It is also easier to do logging etc and t actually see what sensors are in range as there are logs available…
You would then configure each plant using the plant component: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/plant/
This sounds like an even better option to me as I already have Pis for other purposes around the house and might use them instead of buying something extra!
just be aware that Bluetooth on the piw can clash with wifi on the piw, causing drop outs and slowness on the piw network connection
if you are just polling regularly rather than continuously (which doesn’t make sense with miflora anyway), then it will be fine (in my experience)
yea, I essentially poll the devices twice a day to save on battery life on he sensors…
Also, bear in mind that the sensors in their current form are no longer being manufactured by Xiaomi. So get as many as you can… although when I started out, they were selling at £8, but now don’t think you can get them for under £15…
Got some sources for that?
@HorizonKane:
I actually just run home assistant on a couple of extra pis only for the Mi Flora sensors. Then getting the info through the REST API into my main HA.
Might be overkill but it just works.
ali express, alibaba… just ask any of the guys selling these… Alibaba are closer to the factories…
I see some listings saying it’s a new version (VegTrug).
But anyway I stopped buying them from china since I got a lot of them die on me.
quite possible, but generally if you look at any of the app ui’s you will see that they are all the same… mostly… but this is just what I have seen…
I assume this is new brand for the sensors: https://www.vegtrug.com/
They have also made a sensor specifically for outdoor use.
Resuming an old thread.
Which ESP32 board would you recommend for this purpose? I am looking for something compact that can be installed directly on a power socket (e.g. like the Ikea Zigbee extender)?
I am installing Homebridge on a RPI Zero W. With the Mi-Flora plug-in I can update my plant sensors. But how to get this data to home assistant?
I started building my own sensors with moisture sensors, temp and humidity on a ESP32 flashed with ESPhome. It works on tests but I did not cali rate and finalize it yet, the project is paused currently. Hope to find time to finish it soon.
Also plan to add ec sensor.
I’m using the Atom Lite as Bluetooth proxy for my MiFlora sensors but I’m still struggling with the range. My plants and sensors are outside and I’ve got the Atom Lite inside but the signal won’t even go through the wall to the plant that is right outside (less than 1 meter). I only get a signal when I put the Atom in the window opening which isn’t sustainable but even then the range seems to be limited to about 4 meters. Any tips or experiences from people in this thread to increase the range?