re: Educate me on Z-Wave

Yes you can group devices in a room. Gene (the guy who wrote it) has a lot of good info on his webpage. The forms are also handy. Unfortunately Gene has stopped development. He doesnt have time to devote to it. But being open source, the community is always looking for new modules.

I only know C, so I'm limited in what I can do. I haven't need to write any code as everything just works for me.

One cool thing I've added is echo support on my pi. You used to have to run a hue api on your pi and it would send json requests to homegenie. But one of the users integrated the hue api into homegenie. I haven't tried this approach as the other way works fine for me.

For my setup with homegenie, I've got my living room light and backyard flood lights on timers, a outlet in the baby's room attached to a lamp (use echo in their for voice commands so we don't have to hunt for light switch with baby in arms), and I have my garage door monitored and open/close control. To open it I wired a relay in parrallel with the manual button in the garage. The pi sends a 2 sec pulse to the relay to similuate a manual button push.