I wanted some plant sensors and discovered the MiFlora bluetooth moisture sensors. I did some reasarch and discovered I could connect them to Home Assistant using ESPHome and an ESP32. This sounded like a great idea.
I ordered some on aliexpress and waited. Once the sensors arrived, I got everthing running and connected it up to Home Assistant. It seemed to work at first but soon the plant sensors were showing unavailable in home assistant intermittently. There was data being collected so I thought it might be okay.
I connected another sensor and moved one in front of the house and one on the side. Both sensors were about 15-25 feet from the ESP32. One was working intermittently but okay and the other was not working at all (to far away). Also the moisutre data was either at 20% or 40% but not in-between.
I tried fixing the data-collection/intermittnet issue but discovered the ESP32 uses WiFi and Bluetooth on the same radio so it swithes between the two causing these issue. This seemed like it clearly would be difficult to get the radio timing correct and I didn't want to spent hours and hours on it to maybe get it working.
Also the range of the sensors was very poor.
I disssembled everything and sold the sensors. This project was a failure.
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