I have a couple of house plants I’d love to support with HA. The ability to monitor plant status with HA would be awesome.
I see that the MiFlora seems to be pretty popular but it also seems to be pretty unreliable. I also want to avoid reliance on Bluetooth. I would love to make something myself both because it might be a better solution and because it’s more fun!
The Wemos D1 mini seems to be a suitable platform but I havent really found any complete documentation on how to actually build it and integrate it with HA. If anyone can point me in the right direction, that would be awesome!
How are you tracking them? What device is receiving the data? I’ve tried a few solutions latest with an ESP32 which converts to MQTT. It works for the most, but there is always some kind of unreliability surrounding it. Like the temperature suddenly becomes 511 degrees celsius, and a few minutes later it’s normal again.
Other times a miflora stops connecting to it for no obvious reason, and a restart of the data receiving device fixes the issue (temporarily).
Besides the temp spikes, it’s the same issues I have redardless on what tracking device I use. I’ve used a Raspberry Pi3 (and a 3b+) with homeassistant on it, tracking it and sending it via MQTT eventstream / statestream to my main Hass instance. I’ve tried with the same devices, but with Plant Gateway. But regardless of what device and/or service I use, I always find it unreliable to some degree.
And I only run 4 miflora’s atm (where one of them appear to be offline right now, which i know it issen’t).
So i’m very interested in how you can run them reliably.
I use esphome on esp32. It uses passive BLE scan and due to this battery drain is around 2-3% in 3 months. In my setup ESP32 scans 7 MiFlora devices and 4 Xiaomi MiJia BLE Sensor simultaneously. No problems at all for 5 months. The only issues is that MiFlora do not report battery level in passive mode and I had to check it manually via phone application from time to time.
We have two of them in the house and despite the many issues I read from other people, they still work pretty well with my Pi4 and the built in Bluetooth module. Even the official app still works!
I think a lot of negative reviews concern the Xiaomi app that doesn’t sync, but as you wrote, the devices tend to die spontaneously.
Overall I’m happy these devices don’t just rely on a cloud service that may or may not exist forever.
The only issue I experience is the battery lifetime. The battery sensor in both the app and HA show the battery is above 95% and soon after that the device is dead and can only be brought back to life using a new battery. I’d say my batteries lasted for 2-3 months per device, using a scan_interval of 15 minutes. I’ve just extended it from 30 mins to 1 hour to see if that helps.
The scan interval depends a bit on what you want to monitor. The light intensity can change pretty fast while the temperature and the moisture wouldn’t. And so I just got the idea to use multisensors for the temperature and light intensity and just use these MiFlora devices for the monitoring of the moisture.
I created my own simple with an esp12. I can monitor up to 32 plants with a single device. I use a capacitive soil meter and a led light to alert when it needs water. I also have thermistor probe for areas of plants. It uses mqtt and works great. I can post everything if anyone is interested. I didnt like to think about almost $20 a plant. If you don’t mind a little cable and soldering it’s much cheaper to build your own. I could probably design something to do 8 plants with just 3 or 4 chips.
If you could share it would be great. I also made some using a couple of d1 minis. They are powered with regular 18650 batteries but it last for 15 days only.