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If you have RA2, you could buy an absolute minimum Elk for security I guess. As I understand it, the Elk is much more layered than, say, the Omni in terms of options, so the baseline wouldn't have a lot you wouldn't need.    You could also get something like the DSC IT-100, which we also...

I don't think there's any way for anything local to send anything to the Echo. Though it may be able to act as an audio output if it's connected to a PC via bluetooth? If it shows up as an audio output, then we can play audio to it (music or text to speech.)

Though in theory the automation system's touch screens can completely replace the security system's pane, I think it would be prudent to have at least one, somewhere near the front door I'd guess, just in case? In terms of daily usage stuff, yeh, they should easily provide that functionality...

Actually, in terms of UI, I believe that C4 is quite limited in terms of customization. For a long time the UI was barely customizable at all, AFAIK. And even now it's not terribly so, again AFAIK.

There is an official API to do announcements, but it was limited and they aren't currently taking any more participants, AFAIK. I would hope that's because they think they have it figured out and are getting ready for the actual official release of it.

The huge difference is that hacking my PC will typically be difficult if I'm remotely careful, and the payoff is very small for that effort. Hacking a large company is very, very difficult, but the payoff might be enormous. And 'payoff' can mean anything from money, to nationalistic psychos...

For pros, it's not matter of can it do X, it's a matter of can it do X reliably for years at a time? Every time it fails, they get a call. Consumer stuff is just not as reliable as pro level stuff, and that's why pro level stuff exists. It's more conservative and it doesn't follow the latest...

Well, the great unwashed masses are pretty much cloudy eyed, because that's how people make money at the low end and the bulk of new entrants are just playing around with simple stuff.   Some of those people may leave from the real automation oriented products to disappear into the cloud. But...

An interesting point on Google, and the whole 'Google Style Economy', which is from a guy whose name I'm blanking on so I can't give appropriate credit, is that Google's economy is one of zero obligation to the customer. If you never charge customers for things, you have no obligations to them...

On the voice control thing, here is something I wrote up a while back that explains some of why it is how it is:   https://www.avsforum.com/forum/162-home-automation/2951030-automation-thoughts-part-quarteh-voice-control-pro-con.html

  It's also of course now moving up a meta-layer. Companies are have been for a while now trying to push the people who write the programs to use their online services to create their products, and hence be the upstream revenue and information gatherer. So it's like, hey, if you want to do face...

Information grab is integral to most of the new companies getting into this. You think they make real money selling hubs for almost nothing? The hub is their trojan horse into the home, as is the Echo, and all of these companies. All these big companies know that information is the new gold, all...

Yeh, you should get a prompt, and it likely won't work if you don't get that since it may not be able to do things it needs to. I don't have any trouble with it here under Win10. Well, I have trouble with it sometimes, but it's more related to the flakiness that is Z-Wave than Win10.

I wouldn't suggest RPMode, since the driver also will not see anything else that happens while you are in that mode. You are basically disconnecting CQC from the Elk totally if you do that.

A full featured system will include things that happen automonously (scheduled or in response to other things happening), voice control, and touch screens. There are good reasons to use all of those things. Any system that doesn't include user interaction is limited in various ways. People get...

  Hence automation systems, to tie them together. 

  It would have ultimately worked out better had they gone that way probably. Though a unique id in each unit would be better. Having said that, that's nothing to do with master/secondary controller. The same inclusion scheme applies whether you have just a master or a master plus secondary. You...

The above stuff is just setup. Once it's set up, then you don't need to do any of that any more. So it don't make a lot of difference one way or another in the bigger scheme of things. Still, for us, Z-Wave is not a main priority, so we don't have any interest in doing all the work required to...

If your automation system doesn't assume it is the master controller, you can also put the Leviton Vizia RF software on a laptop or tablet and make it the master controller, which makes it reasonably easy to walk around with it and do network maintenance. Then just replicate all the changes back...

Z-Wave devices don't have unique identifier. This is a big shortcoming in Z-Wave, but it's way too late for them to really do anything about it. With all of the existing units out there, it wouldn't do any good.   One big problem that it creates is associations. There's no way to uniquely...