Hi,
I’m the founder of Botanist AS, a Norwegian company producing professional soil sensors for agriculture. We currently sell sensors to orchards, vineyards, and farms in Norway and Spain.
As a Home Assistant user myself, I noticed there are very few soil sensors available for Home Assistant that offer professional-grade accuracy while also being designed for permanent outdoor installation.
Our existing hardware can already work with Home Assistant through BTHome with only firmware modifications, so I’m considering making a Home Assistant-focused version.
Main specs:
- 3% moisture accuracy (VWC. Accuracy comparable to most professional agricultural sensors)
- Measures:
- soil moisture
- soil conductivity (EC)
- soil temperature
- air temperature
- 3+ years battery life on 2×AA batteries (Replaceable)
- Designed for permanent outdoor installation
- IP66
- Multi-depth versions
The idea would be:
- BLE + BTHome
- fully local
- no cloud dependency
- no gateway required
- native Home Assistant discovery
The estimated price would probably land around €220–250 per sensor.
I’m mainly posting to gauge interest from the Home Assistant community before investing time into a dedicated consumer version.
Would this be interesting to you, and if so, what would you want from a product like this?
Background on Botanist:
The platform was originally built for high-density agricultural deployments, focusing on long-term outdoor reliability, low maintenance, and stable measurements over multiple growing seasons. Our current systems are typically sold as multi-sensor installations with gateways and cloud connectivity for professional irrigation monitoring.
Because the hardware already runs on very low-power wireless technology, we know it can be easily adapted into a BLE/BTHome version for Home Assistant as well.
