From Pi to Blue, we’re revisiting Courtenay Watson

We’re revisiting Courtenay, who was last spoke to on Episode 45 six years ago. She’s here to share six years of Home Assistant progress: moving from Raspberry Pi to Home Assistant Blue, mastering the Energy Dashboard with MQTT, surviving cloud outages on Tuya, and restoring from backups in minutes.

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Chapters

00:00:00 Welcome

00:01:04 2019 setup recap

00:03:31 Hardware: Blue and N2+

00:06:00 Real‑time energy tracking

00:12:00 Breaker chaos, disaggregation

00:16:30 Dashboards and thermostat

00:22:00 Tuya cloud lighting

00:27:30 Offline behavior, habits

00:29:30 Less YAML, more UI

00:33:30 Backups and restore

00:38:30 Z‑Wave LR range talk

00:41:30 LoRa and Meshtastic

00:42:00 Hubs, Matter/Thread woes

00:48:00 Voice assistants: then vs now

00:51:00 Everyday control patterns

00:55:00 Advice for new users

00:59:30 Recorder and data

01:03:07 Six‑year roadmap and robots

01:06:14 Wrap‑up and contact info

This episode was made possible thanks to our sponsors

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Products Discussed

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: https://amzn.to/43Dppq4

Ecobee Thermostat: https://amzn.to/3XtOTCR

Shelly energy monitoring clamps: https://amzn.to/488TjDX

Sense Home Energy Monitor: https://amzn.to/4re7oss

Home Assistant Connect ZWA2 (Z‑Wave radio): https://amzn.to/3MfPzsP

Meshtastic LoRa nodes: https://amzn.to/4ihcSyy

Hosts

Phil Hawthorne

Website

Smart Home Products

Twitter: @philhawthorne

Bluesky: @philhawthorne.com

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Rohan Karamandi

Website

Smart Home Products

Twitter: @rohank9

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