Personally I’d run separate 12VDC cabling instead of pulling out from POE if it’s simple to do, but if you get a splitter which will negotiate POE (assuming you don’t run some older passive-POE setup) it should work just fine. But note, that POE goes up to 57VDC, so check that you can run your POE switch/injector with 12VDC at all.

I got HeatIT Z-Push for my Z-wave network recently and it has worked just fine for the short time I’ve been using it.

For wifi-enabled smart devices I created a separate VLAN where all IOT stuff is and that network doesn’t have access to the internet at all, but you could just assign static IP addresses to the devices and prevent them from accessing the internet on the firewall. That’s of course true only for devices you can control via LAN access as well, if your devices happen to work only with the cloud then that approach won’t work.

Our Gree heatpump only needed cloud access for a minute during setup and now it receives command via Home Assistant, but I can understand that even that can be too much information to leak out of the network. At least they got my public IP address and location data from my phone (setup was only possible with an mobile app which required some permissions to work at all), so better approach would’ve been to check these things before purchase.

If you want to wander more on the DIY side of things with ESPHome you can design what ever kind of button array you wish, but that’s a bit more complex route and if you’re just looking for a simple wall mounted switch that might not be the best option out there.

Whatever came with that kit, so the quality is certainly superb, specs are nowhere to be found. I tried to use 100ohm resistor and even attempted to use it without resistor as there’s plenty of schematics around the web without one. I know that’s not ideal, but with 50% duty cycle and short pulses it shouldn’t cause problems.

There’s also 30 second clip showing how the thing is built and it is pretty much scale mail -style pieces with an single pixel e-ink style display (apparently that’s not really e-ink, but something similar). That’s not something I would call ‘fabric’. Embedding electronics to clothing isn’t a new idea and it has been done by hobbyists and professionals over and over again with different solutions, this is just one more.

I don’t doubt her claim, she sewed the dress and the components on top of it, but that’s still not something I would call ‘dynamic clothing’. If I hot glue an E-ink display on my baseball cap and mount batteries + arduino on it would that be dynamic clothing? With some definition, maybe, but in my opinion the story claims to be a bit more than that.

I see you can only buy as B2B?

Hm… I’ve also purchased everything from them as B2B, but I’m pretty sure you can checkout without retail login, just add stuff to the cart and checkout with paypal.

Power and compute unit is rather trivial problem to solve, I suppose it’s big as it’s on a prototype state. But that looks more like a scale mail apron with e-ink displays than a fabric you could actually use as a clothing. Neat tech demo, but that’s pretty much it.

I’m a very much beginner on this and I’m just upgrading an old(ish, latest big remodel is from 90-91) house, so for me it’s important to have an solution which can extend on the existing wiring. I have couple of HeatIt Z-DIM2 dimmers and couple switches from TechniSat (altough these are pretty much impossible to get from Finland which would be nice for warranty and such). The best part for me is that you’ll still have the actual light switch, and on my case even the same rockers and covers from old ones, so you can either rely on automations with movement and light sensors and you still have the option to interact with lights by physically pushing buttons and turning knobs.

I also recently switched one of our floor heating thermostats to z-wave one (HeatIt Z-TRM3) with the same principle. It functions just the same than old one, so you can interact with it physically and then there’s the option to run as complex automations as you wish on the background. Personally I don’t like to rely only on (local) server and interface on my phone/tablet, since it’s often more convenient just to push a switch on a wall than open my phone and find an app on it (but the option to control stuff via app is nice).

Z-Wave has european store (shop.zwave.eu) and I’m pretty happy doing business with them. Couple of B-stock (customer returns and things like that) got RMA’d but beyond that they’ve been pretty reliable and warranties seem to work. Zigbee is something I’m planning to add, but for me they’re not a priority as there’s a lot to do for optimizing electricity consumption with existing hardware.

For DIY side of things I have couple of ESP32 based chinese knockoffs I’m planning to use with DHT22 sensors and potentially some LED strips, but that’s somewhere in the future. I also tinkered a bit with MySensors (mysensors.org) but NRF24L01+ transreceivers I got from ebay (dirt cheap, less than 1€ each) are apparently some counterfeits or factory rejects, as I didn’t get them to work reliably at all even from one end of the desk to another. Specially from ebay the price point of those is really tempting to add a ton of sensors to the system, but in my experience cheaping out on these is just a waste of money. I’m not that experienced with electronics tho, so maybe someone more experienced can give a more educated answer on these.

For smart plugs I have two POPE700397 to plug in random things. I got them to control car engine/indoor heaters and for that they’ve been really nice. I just need to work with home assistant addons a bit to get the scedule management to work properly with a smart phone. The stock timer on HA is a pain in the rear to manage with a touch screen, with keyboard and mouse it works just fine, but I don’t want to open a computer whenever I need to adjust times for those.