homebridge-mi-hygrothermograph

   

Homebridge plugin for exposing measured temperature and humidity from the Xiaomi Mi Bluetooth Temperature and Humidity Sensor as a HomeKit accessory. The new E-Ink sensor and clock are also supported but currently not capable of reporting battery levels.

Installation

Make sure your system matches the prerequisites. You need to have a C compiler and Node.js newer or equal to version 8.6.0 installed.

Noble is BLE central module library for Node.js used to discover and read values from the sensor.

These libraries and their dependencies are required by the Noble library and provide access to the kernel Bluetooth subsystem:

sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez libbluetooth-dev libudev-dev

For more detailed information and descriptions for other platforms please see the Noble documentation.

Install homebridge and this plugin

[sudo] npm install -g --unsafe-perm homebridge
[sudo] npm install -g --unsafe-perm homebridge-mi-hygrothermograph

Note: depending on your platform you might need to run npm install -g with root privileges.

See the Homebridge documentation for more information.

If you are running Homebridge as another user than root (you should) then some additional configuration needs to be made to allow Node.js access to the kernel Bluetooth subsystem without root privileges. Please see the Noble documentation for instructions.

Homebridge configuration

Update your Homebridge config.json file. See config-sample.json for a complete example.

"accessories": [
    {
      "accessory": "Hygrotermograph",
      "name": "Temperature & Humidity"
    }
]

Key	Default	Description
accessory		Mandatory. The name provided to Homebridge. Must be "Hygrotermograph".
name		Mandatory. The name of this accessory. This will appear in your Home-app.
address		Optional. The address of the device. Used when running multiple devices.
timeout	15	Time in minutes after last contact when the accessory should be regarded as unreachable. If set to 0, timeout will be disabled.
humidityName	"Humidity"	Name of the humidity sensor as it will appear in your Home-app.
temperatureName	"Temperature"	Name of the temperature sensor as it will appear in your Home-app.
fakeGatoEnabled	false	If historical data should be reported to the Elgato Eve App.
fakeGatoStoragePath		Optional. Custom path where to save fakegato history.
mqtt		Optional. Configuration for publishing values to an MQTT-broker. See the MQTT section for details.
forceDiscovering	true	Retry start scanning for devices when stopped. For some users scanning will be stopped when connecting to other BLE devices. Setting forceDiscovering to true will start scanning again in these cases.
forceDiscoveringDelay	2500	The delay for when to start scanning again when stopped. Only applicable if forceDiscovering is true.
updateInterval		By default values will be updated as they come in. Often this is once per second, if this is not desired updateInterval can be set to how often updates should be made. Accepts values in seconds.
lowBattery	10	At what battery percentage Homekit should start warning about low battery.
disableBatteryLevel	false	If battery level should not be exposed to Homekit. New E-Ink sensors do currently not support sending battery levels and setting this to true will make Elgato Eve not warn about it.
temperatureOffset	0	An offset to apply to temperature values for calibration if measured values are incorrect.
humidityOffset	0	An offset to apply to humidity values for calibration if measured values are incorrect.

Multiple sensors

When running just one Hygrotermograph accessory there is no need to specify the address of the BLE device. But if you want to run multiple Hygrotermograph accessories you need to specify the BLE address for each of them. If the address is not specified they will interfere with each other.

The easiest way to find the address of the device is to use [sudo] hcitool lescan. It will start a scan for all advertising BLE peripherals within range. Look for MJ_HT_V1 and copy the address. The address is in the format of 4c:64:a8:d0:ae:65.

Update your Homebridge config.json and specify the address key:

"accessories": [
    {
      "accessory": "Hygrotermograph",
      "name": "Room 1",
      "address": "4c:64:a8:d0:ae:65"
    },
    {
      "accessory": "Hygrotermograph",
      "name": "Room 2",
      "address": "2c:34:b3:d4:a1:61"
    }
]

Note that this step is also required when running Mi Flora devices in the same location as they use the same protocol and their data will be intercepted by this plugin.

MacOS

On MacOS hcitool can't be used since MacOS does not provide a way to read the MAC-address of a BLE device. Instead MacOS assigns a device unique identifier for each BLE device in the format of 5C61F8CE-9F0B-4371-B996-5C9AE0E0D14B. This identifier can be found using MacOS tools like Bluetooth Explorer. One can also run Homebridge with debug-mode enabled by using homebridge -D and then watch the logs for the string "Discovered peripheral" and fetch the value under Id. Use this identifier as address in the configuration file.

Timeout

If the accessory has not received an updated value from the sensor within the specified timeout it will inform Homekit that the accessory is not responsive by returning an error until it receives an updated value.

The default timeout is 15 minutes but can be changed by specifying the number of minutes under the timeout parameter in config.json:

"accessories": [
    {
      "accessory": "Hygrotermograph",
      "name": "Temperature & Humidity",
      "timeout": 30
    }
]

If the timeout parameter is set to 0 timeouts are disabled and and devices will not be reported as unresponsive to Homekit.

Naming

By default the Humidity and Temperature accessories visible in the Home-app will have the names "Humidity" and "Temperature". They can be changed in the Home-app if wanted.

It is also possible to set custom initial values by specifying the humidityName and temperatureName parameters in config.json:

{
  "humidityName": "Luftfuktighet",
  "temperatureName": "Temperatur"
}

Elgato Eve

This plugin has support for adding historical data to the Elgato Eve App by using the excellent module fakegato-history.

When using this feature it's required to specify the address of the device as described in Multiple sensors. This is required because fakegato-history requires a unique serial number for each device.

When restarting Homebridge the Eve app will show the Accessories as having 0% battery until the sensor actually reports its battery status. This can sometimes take a couple of minutes. Just be patient and the actual battery status will show up.

The E-Ink sensors do not report the current battery level. This will cause Elgato Eve to incorrectly warn about low battery. Set disableBatteryLevel to true to disable these warnings.

To enable the Elgato Eve feature set fakeGatoEnabled to true in config.json

{
  "fakeGatoEnabled": true
}

fakegato-history caches historical values into a json-file. Usually located in /var/lib/homebridge or ~/.homebridge. To customise this one can set fakeGatoStoragePath to the desired path:

{
  "fakeGatoStoragePath": "/tmp/"
}

MQTT

The plugin can be configured to publish temperature/humidity/battery values to an MQTT-broker.

Basic configuration:

{
  "mqtt": {
    "url": "mqtt://test.mosquitto.org",
    "temperatureTopic": "sensors/temperature",
    "humidityTopic": "sensors/humidity",
    "batteryTopic": "sensors/battery"
  }
}

If one is interested in only publishing a specific value just skip configuring the topics wished to ignore:

{
  "mqtt": {
    "url": "mqtt://test.mosquitto.org",
    "temperatureTopic": "sensors/temperature"
  }
}

To enable authentication specify the username and password parameters:

{
  "mqtt": {
    "url": "mqtt://test.mosquitto.org",
    "username": "admin",
    "password": "hunter2",
    "temperatureTopic": "sensors/temperature"
  }
}

For more options see the MQTT.js documentation. Everything set in mqtt will be passed to the options argument on Client.

Technical details

The plugin scans for Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals and check the broadcast advertisement packets. By only reading the advertisement packet there is no need to establish a connection to the peripheral. Inside each packet discovered we look for Service Data with a UUID of 0xfe95. If found we start trying to parse the actual Service Data to find the temperature and humidity.

By using a Bluetooth LE Sniffer it is possible to see that the peripheral advertises 3 different sized Service Data:

1. 50:20:aa:01:be:64:ae:d0:a8:65:4c:0d:10:04:cc:00:8a:01
2. 50:20:aa:01:ba:64:ae:d0:a8:65:4c:06:10:02:84:01
3. 50:20:aa:01:c0:64:ae:d0:a8:65:4c:0a:10:01:5d

Some bytes stay the same and some bytes change over time. By placing the peripheral in different temperated places it could be established that the last bytes contain the sensor data.

These were the observations:

• In the first example the last two bytes 8a:01 contains the humidity data. 8a:01 as an little endian 16-bit integer is equal to 394 as in 39.4 % relative humidity. If we check the next two bytes cc:00 they equal to 204 as in 20.4 celsius.
• In the second example 84:01 equals to 388 as in 38.8 % relative humidity. No temperature could be found in this data, more on that later.
• In the shortest and third example 5d equals to 93 and this very much looks like the charge level on the battery in percent.
• If we start looking at the other bytes in order the next one looks like a length indicator for the following bytes with 04, 02 and 01 as values.
• The following two bytes almost always stays the same for each sized packet except for the 16 bytes sized data here they alterate between 06:10 and 04:10. After some investigation it is established that these bytes indicate what type of sensor data that will follow. 06:10 will have humidity data and 04:10 will have temperature data. 0d:10 indicate that both humidity and temperature data will follow and 0a:10 that battery data is to be expected.

So we actually have 4 different packets that contains the sensor data:

1. 50:20:aa:01:be:64:ae:d0:a8:65:4c:0d:10:04:cc:00:8a:01
2. 50:20:aa:01:ba:64:ae:d0:a8:65:4c:06:10:02:84:01
3. 50:20:aa:01:bf:65:ae:d0:a8:65:4c:04:10:02:cc:00
4. 50:20:aa:01:c0:64:ae:d0:a8:65:4c:0a:10:01:5d

After some investigation and thanks to node-xiaomi-gap-parser it is probable that the data of 50:20:aa:01:be:64:ae:d0:a8:65:4c:0d:10:04:cc:00:8a:01 represents the following:

byte	function	type
1-2	Frame control	bit field
3-4	ID	uint16LE
5	Index	uint8LE
6-11	MAC-address	string
12-13	Type of data	uint16LE
14	Length	uint8LE
15-16	Temperature	int16LE
17-18	Humidity	uint16LE

Bytes 1-14 have the same function for all 4 variations but the following bytes contain different sensor data.

Legal

Xiaomi and Mi are registered trademarks of BEIJING XIAOMI TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD.

This project is in no way affiliated with, authorized, maintained, sponsored or endorsed by Xiaomi or any of its affiliates or subsidiaries.