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Create a plant sensor card within Home Assistant

Create a plant sensor card within Home Assistant

There are multiple options available to create a plant sensor card to include Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor measurements for a Home Assistant dashboard. This article describes how to create a card by using the Lovelace Flower Card by Olen as this has a nice layout and extensive functionality.

This card can make use from the Open Plantbook database to fetch plant information via the OpenPlantBook integration. Additionally the Alternative Plant Component is used.

The Flower Care Plant Sensor from Xiaomi

The Flower Care Plant Sensor from Xiaomi

The Flower Care Plant Sensor from Xiaomi provides an easy way to integrate monitoring plants into your smart home to get notifications when they require water and monitor the growth conditions.

The plant sensor is installed in the ground next to the plant and measures soil moisture, soil fertility, air temperature and the light the plant gets during the day.

Integrating the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor with Home Assistant

Integrating the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor with Home Assistant

Integrating the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor with Home Assistant is easy with the Xiaomi BLE integration. The Xiaomi plant sensor (also referred to as ‘Flower Care plant sensor from HHCC’, ‘HHCCJCY01’, ‘MiFlora sensor’) will be discovered automatically by Home Assistant.

When the plant sensor has been integrated successfully you can create Home Assistant Lovelace dashboards with plant information cards showing moisture, temperature, conductivity, brightness and the battery level of the plant sensor.

Home Assistant Dahua webcam dashboard including PTZ presets

Home Assistant Dahua webcam dashboard including PTZ presets

A webcam, such as from Dahua, can easily be integrated into Home Assistant and opens the possibility to show life streams within Home Assistant.

If the camera is a so called PTZ camera (moving and zooming is possible) a dashboard card can be created which includes buttons to switch to predefined PTZ presets allowing to show specific views.

This article shows how to setup a dashboard card with the life stream and PTZ preset buttons.

Setup and configure a Geekworm NASPi v2.0 Raspberry Pi 4 case

Setup and configure a Geekworm NASPi v2.0 Raspberry Pi 4 case

Setup and configuring a Geekworm NASPi v2.0 case housing a Raspberry Pi 4 to be attached to a DIN-rail involves the following:

  • case modding to make it possible to attach the case to a DIN-rail;
  • enabling auto power on;
  • installing Raspberry Pi 4 OS
  • installing a script to control the fan based on the CPU temperature
  • mounting a 2.5″ SSD

is explained in detail. This makes the Raspberry ready to be used as for example a web server.