I bought a GXM-01 “ZIGBEE Garden Soil Moisture & Temperature Meter, Sensor-Outdoor Waterproof, Plant Humidity Tester, Compatible with TUYA Smart APP” in hopes of monitoring moisture via SmartThings sensor in the garden of a vacation home.
I was able to link it to SmartThings but cannot see any data, like temp or soil moisture. I emailed technical support who told me it won’t work w SmartThings.
Any suggestions?
Do I need to set up a Zigbee network?
My SmartThings hub is 5-10 years old. Would a newer hub fix the problem?
No, the issue you’ve run into is that Tuya Zigbee devices use a lot of proprietary code that doesn’t work out of the box with hubs from other brands.
You have three choices.
One) get a Tuya hub, connect it to that, and then use the official cloud to cloud SmartLife integration to make scenes from the Tuya hub available in the smartthings app. But that tends to work better with light switches than with sensors.
Two) check and see if a community member has already created a custom edge driver that will work with it. You will need to follow a link that the author gives you to their channel, subscribe your hub to the channel, and then download the custom edge driver. Once it is on your hub, you can go into the smartthings app to the details for that specific device and switch it to using the custom edge driver.
You can find custom edge Drivers on the quick browse lists in the community -created wiki. There is one list for sensors, one for locks, one for light, etc.
if you don’t want to use custom code, but you want more functionality than is available through the current integration, there is another option coming in the future, but it’s not here yet. Tuya has said that several of their hubs are going to be “matter Bridges.” Once that happens, you will be able to add the device to one of those to your hubs and add the hub to your smartthings account, and it will bring in many of its connected devices with it. (But not all devices or all features.) this method will not require any custom code and communication between the devices will be local, which is nice. This is currently an option with some brands’ hubs, but it’s a very new feature, and Tuya has not released theirs yet.
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So it’s up to you how to proceed. Different people will have different preferences. But it’s not likely that there’s anything that a new smartthings hub would give you that your current hub does not, although it would help if we knew the model number of that hub in order to be sure,
The GXM-01 is a well documented device and is supported by Zigbee2MQTT/etc. The manufacturer has been pretty reasonable about updating the firmware based on public reports ( battery, sensor reads,… ).
I have no idea if Smartthings has support for it, but then Smartthings has never really had much in the way of support for this type of device.
Thanks much for all this!
I looked at the wiki briefly and there may be a driver I could use. But I’d have to educate myself re how to find the right one and how to use it.
But maybe the easiest thing to do would be to get a Tuya hub–they look pretty inexpensive on Amazon. Then, I could presumably see the moisture on a Tuya smartphone app, even if I couldn’t link it to ST. Make sense?
Between units, they aren’t very accurate. I have 3 that I stuck in the same area of garden for a while to test, and the soil moisture readings were not very close. But each did read higher when wetter and lower when drier.
They work for my purpose, which is to water each garden bed when it gets too dry. The fact that I have one set to water at 30%, one at 40% and one at 50% (which all seem to be about the same wetness), is immaterial to keeping my plants alive.
