Mysensors has a nice tutorial for a wifi soil moisture sensor that can be included in HA but I have yet to get past the errors that keep it from being added as a device in HA and no one on the forums seems to have an answer either. Does anyone have recommendations of tutorials or low cost solutions that can provide moisture level readings that I can use to schedule watering of plants and gardens? DIY is probably preferred but I would be interested in what is working reliably for HA users.
The Mi Flora sensor (BLE to an ESP Bluetooth gateway) is ok. Limited range and poor battery life without modification.
Mi flora battery mod:
External antenna mod:
Interface:
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There wasn’t much of an answer to the DIY route. I am not sure about the bluetooth option (MI Flora) with battery life as I want mine to monitor my lawn and large garden beds. So I started looking at wired options. There are expensive options such as the vh400 moisture sensor. However after watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udmJyncDvw0 I am going to give the capacititive sensor a go as waterproofed here: https://www.instructables.com/id/Waterproofing-a-Capacitance-Soil-Moisture-Sensor/
Did you end up getting the capacitive sensors to work? I’m looking for a good sensor to bury in my yard in each zone for my irrigation and use that to determine if I should water that zone. I’m thinking that going with the waterproofed sensor like you posted coupled with some weatherproof electrical PVC pipe may work. I’m thinking about running the conduit along with my water lines and then add electrical boxes underground that would house the sensor. I’d cut a slit in the box to push the sensor out of and then seal that slit with caulk. Does anyone see any issues with that solution that I haven’t considered?
Are you using ESPhome to read the output from the capacitive sensors?
Getting back to my original post: It turns out I needed to declare the mysensors library version in a different format than I first thought (2.3) in configuration.yaml.
As far as the moisture sensor question: I am using a simple capactitive moisture sensor and have created a garden irrigation project around it, using and arduino nano and NRF24L01+ radios. I am not convinced it is the best sensor for my needs but don’t want to change anything until I am sure some of my issues I am seeing are not configuration related. My system waters my 5 raised beds based on moisture levels. I am still in the debugging stage but it is working pretty well for me.