1. Introduction

Integrating the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor with Home Assistant (see also our article ‘The Flower Care plant sensor from Xiaomi ‘ for details about the sensor itself) with Home Assistant is easy. When Home Assistant is running fine and the Xiaomi BLE integration is up and running the Xiaomi plant 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.

Be aware that the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor is also known as:

• Xiaomi Mi Flower Care Plant Sensor
• Xiaomi plant sensor
• Flower Care plant sensor from HHCC
• HHCCJCY01 (type number)
• MiFlora sensor
• Flower Care plant sensor

In this article we use as name Xiaomi plant sensor or just plant sensor.

2. Requirements

The following is required:

• A working Home Assistant
• Home Assistant has a working Bluetooth integration
• Home Assistant Xiaomi BLE integration installed
• The official “Flower Care” app for Android or iOS by HHCC installed on your mobile (to update the plant sensor firmware if required)

The next sections assume above requirements have been met.

3. Integrating with Home Assistant

Note: It is handy to label the sensor if you have multiple ones; we label them with ‘Plant 1’, ‘Plant 2’, etc. with a label printer.

For Integrating the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor with Home Assistant follow the steps below:

1. Open the battery cover of the Xiaomi plant sensor
2. Remove the plastic film battery protector (to be sure press the battery down).
3. Within a few seconds Home Assistant will automatically have detected the new Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor
   
4. Click on Notifications to display the message and click on Check it out.
   
5. The discovered plant sensor is shown. Click on configure.
   
   And click on submit
   
6. Select the area for the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor and click finish.
   
7. Select the devices section and enter ‘plant sensor’ in the search devices field.
   
8. The new plant sensor will be shown. Click on it.
   
9. The sensors shown should be the same as below. If not it can be that it takes some minutes before the missing sensors are shown. What might help is removing the battery and placing it back after a few seconds. If still not all sensors shown or they become unavailable it is almost certain the battery is (almost) empty. It happened to us for one of the 5 brand new sensors.Click the edit button in the upper right.
   
10. Enter the plant sensor name. We number the plant sensors for easy reference as indicated on the label attached to the plant sensor. Click on the update button.
    
11. Rename the sensor entity IDs to match the new sensor name. This makes it easier later to pick the correct sensor for dashboard cards, automations etc. If yo do not rename the temperature identity will be for example:
    sensor.plant_sensor_5e6c_temperature
    instead off:
    sensor.plant_sensor_plant_6_calathea_triostar_pauwenplant_temperature
    

4. Update the plant sensor to the latest available firmware

It might happen that the plant sensor is not automatically discovered by Home Assistant if the firmware is too old. It won’t send the right BLE beacons and an update via the mobile app is required. The lowest confirmed working firmware version is 3.2.1 (a lower 3.x version could also be alright). Apart from the discovery issues it is always wise to have the latest firmware installed on your plant sensors.

Follow the next steps to update the Flower Care firmware:

1. Install the official “Flower Care” app by HHCC from either:
   • Google Play (requires location and storage permission)
   • Apple App Store
2. Place the mobile with the app within 10cm of the plant sensor
3. Press the “+” button on the top right in the devices tab of the app
   
   Select the icon for the plant sensor
   
4. Add the plant sensor to the app and select an arbitrary plant
5. Wait for the synchronization of the sensor to finish, and a dialog asking for a firmware update should appear (this might take a few minutes)
6. The installed and latest firmware version can be verified by selecting the plant -> three-dot menu -> Hardware settings -> Hardware update. Per March 2023 the firmware version is v3.3.6.
7. The Flower Care account and app are not required any further for this integration to work with Home Assistant.

5. Finally

If integrating the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor with Home Assistant went successfully you can start adding Lovelace cards with plant information to your Home Assistant Lovelace dashboard.

or create automations to notify you on your mobile that a plant is thirsty.

6. Useful links

Below are links to sites or the Home Assistant community forum which might help you in creating your own dashboard cards with plant sensor information.

• Lovelace flower card by Olen
  
  Dependencies (not required, but fetches plant properties from the web:
  OpenPlantbook integration
  Open Plantbook
  Alternative plants compontent
• Plant monitor
  Lets you merge moisture, conductivity, light intensity, temperature and battery level for a plant into a single Home Assistant UI element. It also supports setting minimum and maximum values for each measurement and will change its state to “problem” if it is not within those limits.
• PlantPictureCard

  

• MiFlora Card by OscarHanzely, which is slightly improved version of the original MiFlora Card by RodBr.
  
• MiFloraDB a rip of the HHCC Xiaomi Mi Flora Flower Care plant database. Site has also links to large set with plant images.
• Home Assistant community forum; MiFlora Sensor Plant Database:
  Post 167
  
  Post 107
  
• Home Assistant community forum; New version of the plant integration
• Home Assistant community forum; Light accumulation for xiaomi flower sensor