Anyone know of a small inexpensive battery-powered Zigbee flower/plant sensors for soil moisture?
Does anyone other than me think there is a need for a small battery-operated Zigbee-based flower sensor for indoor houseplants with features such as; capacitive soil moisture + lumen + temperature + humidity sensors, preferably packaked in a product designed to look good and work well with third-party home automation software/hubs, as well as being small and relatively inexpensive as want one for each and every flower-pot inside the house?
Does anyone know of relatively low-cost Zigbee devices that meet all or most of those requirements?
Note! To clarify, please understand that I am not looking or asking for a Bluetooth-based solution, as instead, I am specifically looking for a Zigbee-based product or hardware with multiprotocol support.
Basically what I am looking for is an inexpensive Zigbee-based alternative to “Xiaomi Mi Flora” (as Xiaomi MiFlora uses Bluetooth/BLE and do not use hardware which can support Zigbee firmware).
I guess technically it could also make use of a “hygrometer” to measure water in the soil?
For reference see these examples of product designs with works in a small flower pot, but please note these do unfortunately not all use hardware with Zigbee support (nor have multiprotocol support):
LilyGO TTGO HiGrow is ESP32 WiFi-based but otherwise almost perfectly matches that description however I would instead like to use Zigbee and some type of standard battery that is widely available.
As far as I know, Spruce Spoil Moisture Sensors by Plaid Systems is currently the only existing commercial Zigbee-based product that you can already buy which matches most of the description, except that is relatively expensive and large (plus it has an ugly colour and design that does not fit indoor flowers IMHO, though in its defence its size and price are probably due to it being fully waterproof as primarily design to outdoor use in your vegetable garden rather than potted plants indoors).
DIYRuZ (modkam.ru) community do have an open-source hardware design for a Zigbee DIY Soil Moisture Sensor Flower board designed based on an older Texas Instruments CC2530 based radio module but I for one would not mind seeing a version similar to that as a commercial Zigbee flower sensor available as a complete kit with enclosure and/or an all finished product available for purchase, and it should preferably be based on the much newer Texas Instruments CC2652 based radio modules.
Hi, I am in search for the same solution but not for my flowers. I use a seed propagator without a thermostat and want to stick a soil temperature zigbee sensor so it can trigger on/off the zigbee outlet where the propagator is connected to. Please kindly share if you find out options from outside this forum! Thanks for your post!
Any new discoveries in this vector of nterest? I just bought miflora and the bluetooth does not even cross my windows five meters away from RPi, kind of useless in our concrete-steel house
No specific device news, but in related news, Espressif announced ESP32-H2 SoC with Zigbee support (thought there are no news released about Zigbee stack, SDK, libraries or code for it as of yet).
I do not measure soil moisture, but the speed at which the flower leafs go down. I use laser ranger once an 4 hours and I set up derivative sensor to calculate movement per hour and if it is more than 5mm/hr it sends me Telegram notification. The leafs are BIG, so for smaller flower speed should be less. It works for about three months on battery charge. I also measure battery. If you are interested in esphome yaml it is here:
I use an ESP32 with esphome as a BLE–>WiFi gateway and have one sit somewhere in every room I have a miflora. All you need is a cheap esp32 devkit board a usb charger and micro usb cable. No external components, soldering etc…
FYI, ITead has now released a wired external “Sonoff MS01 Smart Soil Moisture Sensor” addon that is meant to be paired with Sonoff TH10 or Sonoff TH16 (ESP8266 based devices) to monitor your plants soil moisture, but those make for very bulky and unpractical sensors for monitoring indoor potted plants like flowers, like how most people have in their windows. It also does not include other sensors like for; UV or lumen, temperature and humidity for the air.
Same Russian developer also made a simpler Plant Watering Sensor Zigbee hardware but with CC2530 and based on the DIYRuZ Flower project that he is also selling as EFEKTA by EFEKTALAB. Made by Andrew Lamchenko (a.k.a. smartboxchannel) and sold on Tindie with shipping from Russia:
No, but it looks like what we were looking for. If I understand it correctly, it returns only one number - moisture, maybe the battery but nothing else as the BT MiFlora.
Do you plan to try it? I would try some, maybe three to check the zigbee mesh outside my farraday box flat.
I’ve got a couple on order for the front and back lawns outside and can report back when I have feedback (although delivery from Russia seems to be taking some time). Will move my Mi Flora BT ones inside and run the EFEKTA sensors via ZigBee2MQTT. The transmitting distance isn’t very far, but sight lines have a lot in the way and Mi Flora just isn’t up to it on its own (despite the unexpected, but perhaps just lucky, weather resilience).
Definitely not, but I guess that you could probably modify it to be so by wrapping it with self-vulcanizing silicone rubber tape / self-fusing silicone rubber electrical tapes or something similar.