Add Xiaomi Mi Flora Flower Sensor as Bluetooth accessory

dresden-elektronik / deconz-rest-plugin

deCONZ REST-API plugin to control ZigBee devices

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License

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Add Xiaomi Mi Flora Flower Sensor as Bluetooth accessory #2317

Closed patrickscheips closed 4 years ago

patrickscheips commented 4 years ago

Hi all,

I have a Raspberry Pi running the official Phoscon Homebridge-hue + Raspbian Buster image plus a RaspBee.

Now I got a Xiaomi Mi Flora Flower Sensor that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to expose a plant's fertitlity level and more data. There is a Homebridge plugin that allows to use this sensor with home bridge.

How do I now expose this sensor to homebridge? homebridge-hue seems to get the accessories, that are normally added to the homebridge config.json, from Deconz. Can I somehow add the sensor to Deconz or is there a way to bypass Deconz and add it to homebridge manually? From what I understand, Deconz only supports Zigbee devices and not Bluetooth devices — so I guess I will have to bypass Deconz somehow.

I hope you guys can help me with this.

Thanks, Patrick

ebaauw commented 4 years ago

In a standalone homebridge installation, you would add the other plugin to your config.json, and run homebridge with two plugins. Neither deCONZ nor homebridge-hue would need to know about that. You might want to double check that the deCONZ image won't overwrite your changes, but otherwise you would be OK.

Having said that, I do see some issues particularly for homebridge-mi-flower-care:

Note that Bluetooth and ZigBee (as well as Wifi) share the same 2.4 GHz band. I'm not sure if I would want to run a Bluetooth application on the same host as deCONZ.
To access the Bluetooth hardware, homebridge-mi-flower-care requires homebridge to run under root privileges. I definitely don't recommend that.

patrickscheips commented 4 years ago

Thanks for your reply and for clarifying the disadvantages of this approach. For now, I will refrain from using the Flower Sensors with homebridge because of these potential issues.

stale[bot] commented 4 years ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.