Great questions, @darrell.
Right, this is not new hardware. This new Standalone Alarm Panel feature is available on all generations of the Konnected Alarm Panel and Alarm Panel Pro. It just needs to be updated to our latest firmware (built on ESPHome).
Essentially what this new feature is is that the arming, disarming, alarming logic and entry/exit delays can now run on the alarm panel chip itself independently of Home Assistant or other hub or cloud connection. This means that even if the network is down, the alarm system will still be able to trigger a locally connected siren or other actuator in the event of an alarm.
Right now, the main user interface is still Home Assistant. So you do still need Home Assistant as a hub on the network for your normal daily use, arming, disarming, and automations to do so. But, the initial setup is far simpler because the “alarm system” functionality is provided by the device itself so you don’t need to set up Alarmo or the manual alarm control panel in HA anymore. It just works.
Soon, we’ll have support for interfaces with other platforms, including SmartThings and Alexa.
If HA isn’t available, there’s not much you can do just yet to interact with it, aside from siren still sounding. But, I’m planning on rolling out features that would let you use a local keypad, local keyswitch, local fingerprint sensor, etc to interact with the arming and disarming of the device. Let me know what would be most important to you, so we can prioritize the development of those features!
Hope this helps.