I’ve been suing the MiFlora Home Assistant integration to get data on various house plants for a while. However along the way I’ve had to overcome various hurdles including limited range of bluetooth, battery life issues, and getting the battery values to report. I finally seem to have cracked all of these and now have a system that works reliably with lots of plants around the house. I’ve summarised what I’ve used below.
हार्डवेयर
The first thing to say is that I do have a bluetooth यूएसबी dongle attached to my home assistant system. This monitors the plants in range directly (अर्थात. the ones in the same room as the HA box). To monitor more distance devices I have used an ESP32 board with built-in bluetooth module which I have inside a cheap little case and have powered with an old micro-यूएसबी phone charger
- यूएसबी डोंगल: the one I got is no longer available — due to age — but there are plenty of amazon and elsewhere — just make sure it has support in linux
- ESP32 board: I got a JZK ESP32‑S which is currently £6.49 on amazon
- Case for ESP32: I found the case for a NodeMCU Wroom-32D (short aerial) fitted my board — this was £4.20 from ebay
Integrations for Home Assistant
Whilst the basic MiFlora integration is built in to home assistant I found it uses a lot of battery when used natively. Instead I use the Bluetooth Low Energy Monitor 3तृतीय party integration which you can install easily using HACS
I then also installed the ESPHome integration for home assistant to manage my ESP32 BLE repeater
आखिरकार, to display the plants in a nice way I added a particular fork of the lovelace plant card addon via HACS
विन्यास
Once BLE Monitor was installed and configured with my bluetooth dongle it picked up the MiFlora sensors within range and listed them in its “devices” drop down as well as listing the devices and entities on it’s card in the HA configuration
The great thing about BLE monitor is that it listens for the sensors to transmit, rather than actively polling them, which would run down their batteries. कैसे कभी, the sensors don’t transmit battery information so to get this we have to actively poll for it. Polling just for this, and passively listening for the other data seems to be the best compromise if you want to have all the data available but also maximise the sensor’s battery life. I have separated my configuration.yaml into multiple separate files to keep things a bit easier to manage so I just have the following line in my configuration.yaml —
सेंसर: !include sensors.yaml
Then in sensors.yaml I have each plant listed as follows
- मंच: miflora mac: 'Mac:पता:का:खिले:सेंसर:here' name: basil force_update: true scan_interval: 08:00 मंझला: 3 go_unavailable_timeout: 43200 निगरानी_शर्तें: - बैटरी
Next — to make the plants appear nicely I have a plants config. config.yaml में एक पंक्ति से पहले की तरह शुरू करने के लिए:
पौधा: !पौधों को शामिल करें
और फिर plant.yaml में मेरे पास इस प्रकार है
तुलसी: सेंसर: नमी: sensor.ble_moisture_basil battery: sensor.basil_battery temperature: sensor.ble_temperature_basil conductivity: sensor.ble_conductivity_basil brightness: sensor.ble_illuminance_basil min_battery: 15 न्यूनतम चमक: 2500 अधिकतम_चमक: 60000 न्यूनतम_तापमान: 8 अधिकतम_तापमान: 32 न्यूनतम नमी: 15 अधिकतम_नमी: 60 न्यूनतम चालकता: 350 अधिकतम_चालकता: 2000
Note the subtle difference between the entity name for the battery compared with the other sensors. The battery entity is coming from the miflora platform in sensors.yaml whilst the other 4 sensors are coming from the BLE integration. There IS a battery entity listed by the BLE integration but this just shows as “unknown” for this plant. This configuration is needed for the plant card to show the plant in a nicely presented way
फिर बस उस स्थान पर जाएँ जहाँ आप अपना पौधा लगाना चाहते हैं और लवलेस प्लांट कार्ड जोड़ें. You will have to “configure” the card manually, but it only takes 3 lines…
टाइप: रिवाज़:flower-card entity: plant.basil species: बेसिलिक बेसिलिक
Note that the species is listed for 2 कारणों. Firstly it will display the name on the card, लेकिन अधिक आयात antly, it will also display a picture of the plant if you have downloaded the plant images and added them into \config\www\images\plants using the latin names — the information on the database is available on the lovelace plant card documentation
विस्तार सीमा
आखिरकार, हमें उस सीमा का विस्तार करने की आवश्यकता है जिस तक हम पहुँच सकते हैं. इसके लिए हमें ESP32 डिवाइस की जरूरत है. The first thing to do is to get it hooked up to your computer via यूएसबी और इसे मूल ईएसपीहोम छवि के साथ फ्लैश करें
मैंने इस्तेमाल किया ESPHome Flasher और cp210x universal windows driver from SiLabs and followed the guide provided by the ESPHome HomeAssistant integration
The config I used for my ESP32 device is below
esphome: नाम: jzk-esp-32s platform: ESP32 board: esp32doit-devkit-v1 # Enable logging logger: # Enable Home Assistant एपीआई api: वाई - फाई: ssid: !secret wifi_ssid password: !secret wifi_password # Enable fallback hotspot (captive portal) in case wifi connection fails ap: ssid: "Esp32 Fallback Hotspot" पारण शब्द: "random-password-here" external_components: - स्रोत: github://myhomeiot/esphome-components esp32_ble_tracker: ble_gateway: उपकरणों: - mac_address: mac:पता:का:खिले:सेंसर:तक:monitor:goes:here on_ble_advertise: फिर: homeassistant.event: event: esphome.on_ble_advertise data: packet: !lambda return packet; myhomeiot_ble_host: myhomeiot_ble_client: - mac_address: mac:पता:का:खिले:सेंसर:तक:monitor:goes:here service_uuid: '1204' characteristic_uuid: '1A02' update_interval: 4h on_value: फिर: homeassistant.event: event: esphome.on_ble_advertise data: packet: !lambda |- अगर (x.size() 2) { ESP_LOGE("myhomeiot_ble_client", "payload has wrong size (%डी)", x.size()); वापसी ""; }; ESP_LOGI("myhomeiot_ble_client", "बैटरी (%d%%), फर्मवेयर (%एस)", X[0], std::string(x.begin(), x.end()).substr(2).c_str()); char buffer[70 + 1]; const uint8_t *remote_bda = xthis.remote_bda(); snprintf(बफर, sizeof(बफर), "043E2002010000%02X%02X%02X%02X%02X%02X14020106030295FE0C1695FE41209800000A1001%02X00", remote_bda[5], remote_bda[4], remote_bda[3], remote_bda[2], remote_bda[1], remote_bda[0], X[0]); return std::string(बफर).c_str();
Then save and update to your esp32 device via wifi. The ESP32 device will pick up the data from the miflora sensor and will ‘push’ it via wifi to the BLE integration which will create a device and entities automatically. Devices pushed in this way do appear to show their batteyr level (thanks to the code at the bottom of the myhomeiot_ble_client section I believe). You then just need to give the device a nice name (and let the entities be renamed too) and then create an entry in plants.yaml with the right entities
हाय,
es gibt doch auch die Version die flora Sensoren via ESP script auszulesen und an den MQTT Broker zu schicken. Finde da leider noch nicht die richtige Beschreibung wie ich dann die in MQTT enthaltenen Daten als Sensor in HomeAssistant publishen kann.
Hier der Link dazu: https://www.barrymercer.co.uk/wordpress/2020/04/27/mi-flora-home-assistant-and-mqtt-gateway/
हाय
हां, I actually use ESP32 repeaters myself now as they are able to use “passive” mode AND collect battery data.
If you have a यूएसबी bluetooth device then you can pair the MiFlora devices directly to that first and then when you set up the ESP32 it will send the information into HA and it will show up for the correct entities automatically
You need to use the code as I describe in the “Extending range” section.
You also need to have the “Bluetooth Low Energy Monitor” integration installed (via HACS)
If you don’t have a यूएसबी Bluetooth then there is a way to get the devices to show up in Bluetooth Low Energy Monitor. I can’t remember the link where I read it but I think it’s part of the Bluetooth Low Energy Monitor Wiki or FAQs
If you do it that way then you don’t need to use the manual YAML that Barry uses. His post is from 2020 — I think before Bluetooth Low Energy Monitor could do it or maybe before it even existed.
नमस्ते, thank you for posting this great solution.
Can the esp32 Bluetooth gateway transmit data more than one bluetooth device or or do you have to provide one ESP 32 for each Bluetooth device we want to extend the range for?
Hi Tony
The ESP will transmit data for any BT devices within range I believe although as mine is currently only used for 1 BT device I can’t confirm 100% — but that is certainly my understanding