Hello, friends.
For about a year and a half, I have successfully worked with the mi flora plant sensor, and finally, I have matured to test a smart flower pot and compare its capabilities with the mi flora sensor.
Where could I buy?
Packaging
I immediately got two pots, a Chinese and a global version. You can even distinguish them by the box — a flower is painted on the global version.
Parameters are written in Chinese and English, respectively. It’s worth highlighting the type of interface, it uses energy-efficient Bluetooth, and the capacity of the rechargeable battery is 350 mAh, which should last for two to three months.
The delivery kit is the same — a pot, a plate for it, a 1-meter USB-micro USB charging cable and instructions, one in Chinese, the other in English.
Outwardly, it is a classic plastic flower pot.
The difference from the usual one is the LED indicator, and the back has a charging micro USB port.
Inside there are three metal rods for soil analysis.
In the bottom of the pot, as expected, there are openings for water drainage.
Let me remind you that the mi flora sensor is designed for use in ordinary flower pots and has two plates with sensors that need to be immersed in the soil. The sensor is powered by a CR2032 flat battery, for a year and a half I changed only one — about two months ago.
Before use, the pot needs to be charged; when charging, the emblem in the form of a flower glows and flickers green. When charging is complete, flicker disappears. When connected to a smartphone, the indicator flickers green twice, red — when the battery is low, flickering yellow — low fertility, blue — moisture, flickering with a high frequency — too high.
Pot and sensor control
Management can be carried out by several methods. For example, the original application.
Flower care
Once it was in Chinese, now it is localized. To connect, you can use the mi account, the location I chose mainland China. miflora I have already been connected.
The miflora sensor records 4 indicators — soil moisture and fertility, temperature and light exposure. All these indicators are saved and you can view their change in the context of the day, week and month.
To add a new sensor, click on the button with the plus image, select the type — sensor or pot — wait for the scanning process to complete, select the type of plant, and a new device will appear in the list.
Unlike the sensor, the pot captures only two indicators — humidity and fertility. In the settings you can manually set the necessary parameters for the plant, view reports, find out the percentage of battery charge.
Update firmware on a flower pot — no matter how wild it sounds, now it’s commonplace. Most of the text relating to plants is in English, which is still nicer than Chinese, but there are Russian texts that are quite funny.
You can also connect devices to
Mihome
The information here is at first glance the same — 2 parameters for the pot and 4 for the sensor.
But there are more possibilities, first of all, access, if you have devices with a Bluetooth gateway, and there are quite a lot of them in the ecosystem now, you can control data from sensors from anywhere in the world, and not just near devices. In the plugin there will be a switch — work on the BT gateway or directly.
In addition, the devices can serve as scenarios — for example, for notifications, when each of the four parameters is exceeded or decreased for the sensor or two for the pot.
You can control devices from alternative systems, for example
Home assistant
But if there is a Bluetooth interface on the control instance — for example, Raspberri Pi 3+. To do this, using the BLE scanner on the smartphone, or when activating the tracking mode for Bluetooth devices, in the configuration.yaml file, which outputs to the known_devices.yaml file all the gadgets found in the coverage area, get mac addresses. This will not affect the work in Mihome and the original application.
After that, we create sensors on the miflora platform, which indicate the mac address, additional settings such as forcing data and the median, which evens out bursts of values, and list the parameters for monitoring, adding an additional battery level.
Based on this, you can create new entities — plants. Which are a list of control sensors. This is necessary for display convenience — both in the standard interface and in the alternative lovelace.
Another minus to pots is that not only do they have less parameters, but also the platform in the Home Assistant understands only the battery charge. With the sensor, all parameters work correctly.
There is a separate type of maps for plants for the lovelace interface, where a plant is registered immediately and all its parameters are displayed.
The map looks the same as in the standard Home Assistant interface.
The appearance, as well as a small bonus in the form of setting up the broadcast of sensor readings from one Home Assistant server to another, is in the video version of the review
My opinion is that buying external sensors is more practical. Firstly, they can be used in pots of any type, size, and even directly on the beds. Secondly, they take more data, temperature and illumination are also very important for plants, you can even automate the inclusion of special lamps for plants. Well, if you use Home Assistants, then the sensors correctly give all the parameters, but I hope that the pots are also integrated into the system sooner or later.
