Soil moisture & automated irrigation

Did you connect it to HA or is just the graph from HA and you connected it to HE?

It's connected to Hubitat and integrated to Home Assistant via MQTT (I'm glad Hubitat was released and freed me from the nightmare that the ZHA component was on Home Assistant, at least a year and a half ago when I last used it).

And you used a custom driver or something generic?
If I would use the sprouce only with HE, what do I have to expect? just a value? maybe a screenshot of the device page please.

I'm using a driver someone ported from ST in another thread. Thar being said, the Generic Zigbee Motion/Humidity driver works nearly as well, just without rounding the humidity (soil moisture) value to the nearest integer. It just reports that and temperature besides battery, nothing too exciting. Making sense of the moisture values is what I'm trying to figure out now--the Spruce docs say 10-45 is typical, but mine spikes at the upper end of that shortly after watering and quickly bounces down below that. Could be my soil, mostly clay.

Okey, thanks. I hope you can report back after a few weeks.
Are you using it for grass or for a flower/legumebed?
I want something like this for my legumebed... I'm a horrible urban farmer :stuck_out_tongue:

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.

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@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


I havenā€™t seen the spikes that @bertabcd1234 has seen with my sensor/driver

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 didnā€™t 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 wasnā€™t reporting humidity at all. The second sensor they send me works fine. I am using this driver here:

Repeater canā€™t cause this behavior, so it shouldnā€™t 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 ā€œjust 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 donā€™t mind if I have to install yet another bridge to get what I want from another IoT device. I donā€™t see any reference to an API, so Iā€™m curious if thereā€™s 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.

https://m.banggood.com/XIAOMI-Qingping-Blueooth-WIFI-Gateway-Applicance-Switch-Linkage-Gateway-Smart-Door-Lock-Wi-Fi-Gateway-Bluetooth-Mesh-Gateway-Lock-Wi-Fi-Gateway-Work-With-Mijia-APP-p-1566477.html?rmmds=search#popupStatedetail

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