New Green Mi Flora Plant Sensors

I have around 15 of the white Mi Flora Plant Sensors around my house and they have been working flawlessly for some time some over a year now.

I received some new ones last week some were shipped directly from the Australian dispatch and were in newer packaging but still white and connected as expected.

I received 2 more from Chinese dispatch and these ones are a green colour, they connect fine but won’t display any readings at all except battery. Has anyone come across these do I need to seek @syssi help with the Mi Flora Component or are these sensors simply not compatible yet?

What’s the MAC address and name (sudo hcitool lescan) of the next generation device?

Mac Address - 'C4:7C:8D:6A:10:60'

Name - Flower care

Hi

I also received the green ones but they are working fine. Well, except from no battery reading.

I was also suprised by that they could be added in mi flora app without having to use a Chinese proxy.

I’m using ESPHome as gateway. In case you where only having problems in the miflora component.

I just bought some green ones from Banggood. Mine registered fine on the flowercare app (w/ location as EU) and (almost) worked right out of the box in HA. I was getting worried as I bought 3 and the first wasnt connecting, it took 20 mins to realise I’d mistyped the mac address :see_no_evil:. If you type the mac address correctly they work first time! :joy: My setup is hassio on a Pi, the mifloras are all read by the pi directly. Everything seems to be reporting properly.

miflora

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OK thanks for confirming that. I have around 14 white ones that worked as expected, just the 2 green ones only reported battery I will have another crack. I have never added them to the mi app might try that first to confirm they do actually work.

I just received a green one too (aliexpress).
I will be trying it with the ESPhome esp32 BLE gateway.

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The green mi flora works well with ESPHome.

Thanks for confirming, that’s good to know. I’m planning on moving my setup from a pi to a NUC so if I can’t get bluetooth to work it’s good to know I can use some ESP32s instead!

No probs. Esp32 with esphome is super easy to set up, extremely cheap (£3.50 from AliExpress for an esp devkit1), and allows you place a number of gateways around your home.

I have tried with 3 different instances and each one has other mi flora sensors on them working fine. I just can’t get them to read the green ones, I need to try esp home.

Did you activate the mi flora in app 1st?
Im sure you did btu just checking :wink:

Just to add to the compatibility list.

I’ve a ‘miflora green’ happily recognised & working via Hassbian (HA 0.93.2) on a Pi Zero.

I didn’t use any app beforehand, and no special setup on HA either.

I know this thread is a bit old. But have any of you had problems or not with them? I have 7 of the “green” mi flora, polling them once every hour with plant gateway running on a RPi (MQTT connection to HA). And they are dying without reporting low battery but I can get them to work again with a fresh battery. Started using them this summer, replaced batteries in all of them twice and now only one is upp and running.

Anyone have a similar experience with them?

Yep exactly the same, battery life in the green ones is terrible.
It seems it sends updates a lot more often
My white ones are still ok. i gave up on the green ones with replacing battery every month or so.

You could try the custom component for the MIflora plant sensor.

It doesn’t poll but listens to the periodic broadcasts and should cut down on battery usage.

Thank you! I will try it. But unless something is very strange I would think that polling once every hour should not effect battery life much. Should maybe see if there is an esp chip inside and if it can be flashed with esphome.

Looking at how often it updates while using the flower care up it feels like the battery issue is a “feature”, it constantly broadcasts data.

Has anyone heard of any firmware hacks?

Based on this blog post at least the white one is not esp based:
https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/projects:xiaomi-flora

Are there alternatives?
The price of these sensors has increased over the past year and the green ones are too battery hungry to be a good deal right now.
Unless there’s a firmware hack, which I did not find.