Are there any other Zigbee options? Spruce are very expensive for me because they already cost quite a lot for what they are, and then I'd have to import them, so I get the not-living-in-the-US fee slapped on top.
The Xiaomi are inexpensive and someone has built a way to communicate with them via a PI and MQTT, but they are Bluetooth, they're not waterproof, and the limited BLE range would make them useless for outdoor situations, even if they were waterproof.
I searched the whole spring for the exact same thing. But unfortunately I haven't found a solution. It seams smart gardening is too much of a niche market.
@bertabcd1234 Hi Robert, It's been a while since we last talked about the sprouce... how's your integration doing? Did you figure it out? and do you get useful inside in your garden?
I'm keen to read about your experience so far...
It's...OK. I still have a hard time figuring out its measurements, which seemed to hover around 4-6 in my soil except after a watering where they'd spike about 10 times higher. Now suddenly it's giving me readings in the 400s, possibly the same values but not divided and rounded. I didn't change the driver and I don't think it was a hub update as I initially suspected (rolling back didn't help). I've added another rounding by 10 into the driver to see if it helps (not sure if it should be 10 or 100 because I'm not sure if it was right before, either).
I'm starting to think it might just be easier to check rainfall totals from the weather reports. I know how much my plants need and this doesn't seem as useful as I thought. Your mileage may vary.
I think the sensor does what they say it does. We have to remember, we will never get 100%. Here is a link to spruce description of what you should expect: What is my target moisture level? - Spruce Support
Also, here is a graph of my sensor in my front lawn that has full sun all day and we had some pretty hot days up here in New England over the last two weeks or so
And here is the corresponding temperature measurement of the lawn by the sensor
Interesting that you are getting humidity data into grafana. I couldn't get my two spruce sensors data to show up in grafana. They report the moisture data fine in live logging.
I am wondering if there is issue with the driver i'm using.
How are you feeding grafana? Via node-red? Maybe it gets filtered there
Node-red.. Did you have to add something to support Humidity in Node?
No, not specifically. It depends on you flow. in mine, there is a filter attribute node that does some filtering and there is something in the back of my head that there was once an issue with something misspelled or an attribute I wanted was missing. Just not sure anymore what attribute that was
Sure, but I'm getting 471% (native motion/humidity driver or ported ST driver) and don't know how to interpret their values. Before it did this, it tended to settle around 4-6%, spiking up to about 10x that after a watering. (I didn't change anything except bring it back on the network when it fell off--I needed an Xbee as close to outside, where this sensor lives, as I could get. Maybe the repeater type matters for some reason? I don't know what it routed through before.)
I've read their documentation and none of this behavior seems consistent with what they expect it to read (though I understand my soil type plays a factor), though I'm guessing it was much closer to being vaguely correct before than it is now.
This seams to be useful... could you post a graph with just a week duration instead of a month.
It's hard to interpret the curve without actually knowing what happened in your garden.
How did you automat your watering... below a certain moisture level or strictly by time ( or a combination of both)?
Sorry, I think I didnāt say that correctly, I meant to say something to the regard that after watering, no one should expect it to be 100% and then go down to 0% because the ground is dry.
Yes, your 471% is definitely abnormal. I actually had to RMA my first Sensor as it wasnāt reporting humidity at all. The second sensor they send me works fine. I am using this driver here:
Repeater canāt cause this behavior, so it shouldnāt matter what they go through. Mine goes through an XBee as well
Here are the two graphs for a 7 day period
My irrigation is actually automated through my Rachio, Hubitat has nothing to do with it. Moisture has nothing to do with it either.
The reason that I got the spruce sensor is for something different. I have a terrible time with crabgrass in my front lawn. My theory is that due to being exposed to full sun all day long, it heats up quicker than my back lawn (which is fine) in the spring time and I apply the crabgrass preventer too late. I am going to track the lawn temperature with the spruce sensor next spring to be able to apply the crabgrass preventer when the lawn heats up to 55 degrees over three days instead of ājust doing it in the spring timeā.
Anyone try these?
They may work with other Fine Offset bridges such as Ambient Weather or it may be possible to extract data from their bridge via Weewx. They are low cost and IP66 rated. Even the bridge is not that expensive, so I donāt mind if I have to install yet another bridge to get what I want from another IoT device. I donāt see any reference to an API, so Iām curious if thereās another way.
This WiFi to Bluetooth bridge is now available so you can use Bluetooth products like the MiFlora BLE plant moisture sensors with the MiHome app. Would be nice to see some HE community drivers for this.
I did a bit of work looking into these ECOWITT moisture sensors, they are 433mhz transmitters, so totally possible to exfiltrate data from these and use mqtt etc to get into hubitat
EDIT just a bit of digging but they sell a wifi gateway for 35 bucks and it supports sending data to a http endpoint of your choice using a published protocol, it's probably not even worth knocking up your own system to talk to these for that.
So i realize this post is a bit old at this point. But I've been trying to set a plant watering system for an indoor application. I've been experimenting with capacitive sensors/arduino to try to get soil moisture values but it's been a PIA in one way or another. But.........
Sonoff just released a moisture sensor(thank God) that looks promising. I have 3 on order and should arrive within the next few days. The sensor is an add-on to the Th10 or Th16 like they do with their temp probes. I'll report back once I break into it. I Hopefully this is the sensor that fills this gap in HA.
It looks like the TH10/16 are wifi... that's kind of an HA killer for me.
Just FYI, I made Zigbee Environment Sensor which is expandable. For more detail, please follow the link. I do not want to bother everyone with detail here. One of the expansion is capability to read Analog Input.
You can get a capacitive soil sensor like below.
There are 3 wires to connect for power, ground and analog voltage.
You will be able to use and monitor your soil like here.
If you are interested on setting one up and need more detail, feel free to PM me.
Thanks
Iman
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