Revisited

From Pi to Blue, we’re revisiting Courtenay Watson

Published 2 days ago
Recorded November 3, 2025
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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.
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

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Hosted By

Phil Hawthorne

Phil is a Melbourne based web developer who lives and breathes technology. When he's not at his day job, he’s in his home office attempting to simplify his life through complicated tech.

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Rohan Karamandi

Rohan from Toronto, Canada works in the Technology sector as an architect designing network and datacenter solutions for his customers. His passion for technology stems from there and extends to IoT and home automation

Website Smart Home Products Buy a Coffee


Special Appearances By

Courtenay Watson

I'm a dog trainer and animal health technologist (aka veterinary nurse). Working for IDEXX laboratories as part of a team that replaces paper in veterinary clinics with an iPad app. I've been a computer geek most of my life, and have increased my geekyness lately!

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Spotlight

 

Special episodes focused on various aspects of Home Assistant and Home Automation.