OpenLuup help

I’m getting more serious about my mi*******, uhhh, I mean , ahhh, enhancement with OpenLuup and I have some questions I could use a little help with.

  1. notifications; I use many VeraAlerts, it looks like Reactor and Growl are my best bet here, yes? It looks like there’s no built in notification component or am I missing something?

  2. devices; A) how do I best deal with video cameras? (with no need for motion detection or recording) B) Is there support for my somfy z-wave window shades? It’s an odd setup with a single controller.

  3. integrations; A) I use Weather Underground, is there a way to integrate my weather station? B) How is the Alexa integration?

  4. scenes; I just learned about the great get scenes action in vera bridge and how it’s different than in linked scenes (it gets the actual lua code) Some VeraAlerts I had made it skip a few with errors but it handled this gracefully. I spent so much time with OpenLuup and didn’t know about this. Is this new? This is amazing.

Lastly I’m curious about users impressions of running the zwave plug on the pi? Does it have range issues? Whats the best way to transition devices? My limited understanding of zwave is that controller 0 is the master controller and all others are subservient, as I understand it my Vera is 0 and my Pi is 1, is that right? Do I change this after everything is all pi? Should I get a second pi to transition devices onto? Stepwise exclusion, followed by inclusion on pi, then re-integration in reactor?

I really appreciate all the help I’ve received from some very smart people, like rafale, and akboor. Man this stuff is complicated and time consuming it would be absolutely impossible without this knowledge base.

best,

|-<:)