I am looking for a good and reliable temperature and humidity sensor with a refresh time of about 30 seconds to 1 minute. I was using Sonoff TH10 and they worked okay up until one day when they all died with no reason. They didn’t survive one year. I have no idea why and i am still troubleshooting. I am just looking for a reliable solution even if it’s a bit on the expensive side.
I really liked the Sonoff and the way they setup and work but i am not buying them anymore.
I am not that good with programming and maybe this question is dumb but i am looking at the Shelly, however I don’t know if there is a way to force is to update temperature every 30 seconds.
Basically looking for a good reliable and quality temperature and humidity sensor with good refresh time and accuracy to 0.1C
I have 2 Shelly H&Ts. They only update when the temperature change is at least 1 degree. I read somewhere that 0.5 degrees was possible (in terms of delta; it can of course have any value within its operating range), but I wasn’t able to set such a value. Anyway, I dont think it will work for you. It needs to be ultra conservative to preserve battery. To get what you want you probably need to go for a permanently powered device.
You might have a read of this research I did a while back on a couple types of sensors:
I am happy with the operation of custom firmware’ed Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC devices and a number of the Govee devices that send readings a useful rate (note some of the Govee devices do NOT send at a useful rate). The battery life of these devices had been on the order of 1 to 2 years… or still going. For USD 5 each range, the Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC are a great buy, I run them indoors and outdoors. My philosophy on them, is if they die, I will just replace them. I have unfortunately at a few stupid times in the past paid more for a CR2032 battery than one Xiaomi device.
You can find these here, last I checked available with reasonable shipping:
I have 8 of the Xiaomi sensors @dproffer mentioned. They have a default refresh of 60s and, once flashed with one of the custom firmwares, can be modified to advertise as often as every 10 seconds and set one sensor to instantly advertise if it changes within the 5s main loop. Additionally, the custom firmware allows you to adjust the values of both humidity and temperature.
They do require significantly more setup than plug-and-play options, but 90% of it can all be done over the air with a phone while sitting on the couch…
I believe I will give it a try with the Xiaomi ones. At least for now I will buy one to try it out. My HA is running on a Virtual Box on one Intel NUC which is having bluetooth. Do you recommend to use it directly or it’s better to get ESP32 and use it as a middle man?
Success with your setup will depend on a couple factors. Get ready for a bit head scratching, don’t get frustrated, expect your first path may not be the best one for you to end up on, and have a ready…
Reading into your setup from your post, the following points come to mind:
Getting a bluetooth adapter to be accessible by Home Assistant within Virtual Box VM can take some work, google various folks experiences and success.
I have heard that some Intel NUC units are rather ‘noisy’ due to their USB 3 connectors being poorly shielded. You might have reception issues as a result, if you have one of the type units. Some solutions, include using a USB bluetooth adapter attached to a 1 meter USB cable plugged into the USB 2 not USB 3 port. Here, you have to make sure you select the correct bluetooth device, since you will not have two in the NUC.
Many folks seems to have had success with the ‘built in’ HA BLE solutions using a BLE adapter on the machine which is running HA. And there are folks using the ESP32 as a ‘bridge’, pros of this is that you can position the ESP32 independent of the HA server for optimal reception, cons of this is that is more complex with another device to manage.
As I said, I have good luck with my external Raspberry Pi box bringing the sensors into HA. I am receiving data from 20 temperature and humidity sensors. Very reliable.
A bit of oil on the fire
Regardless of the refresh-rate, if the measurements are wrong then you still have nothing (or just a bunch of figures).
I have 3 different-brand temp gauges and none of them behave similarly with diff +0.9 to - 1.6, compared to a calibrated temp. .
In many HA stuff I find similar requests but few of them seem to aim to ‘exact’ values. I myself am still in the dark why modern-day temp gauges differ that much… and they differ non-stable as well…when colder then more exact…sigh
I am currently also looking into ESP32 and BME280 as well as a backup. People say that it is accurate and consistent.
If someone here knows a really good temperature and humidity sensor with accuracy 0.1C no matter the price i need to look into it. I believe with the BME280 i can get a calibrated sensor and calibrate the bme280 and check if it’s consistent. I believe the same could be done with the xiaomi with custom firmware as well. I am not buying anything yet until i am sure what i am dealing with. Appreciate the help of everyone here!
I happen to got the Xiaomi Sensor and ESP32. It’s set up into home asistant already I am monitoring the logs and so on. I have only one small question. Is there a way to leave the advertizing time as 10 minutes but at the same time force advertizing the moment it changes with 0.1C? That way it will not report the same temperature over and over again but only report the changes of 0.1.
I’m not sure if what you ask is possible, as you probably know there are at least two groups working on firmware for these devices. I am still on the original firmware by @atc1441. I would do some searching of the github issues sections of both these repositories. And if someone has not yet answered your question, I would post it there. Most of the new work I have seen is by the @pvvx group, so that is probably a good place to start.
Glad you are making some progress, as I said, I am happy and amazed by the function, cost and usefulness of these low cost devices. Hope you find good results as well!
a ready…