An interesting thought does strike me as I create some tools and automations. I was pondering the new door sign doorbell thing and making it have seasonal displays and automating it all.
And I pondered that it is not impossible that a lot of these silly little things could out live me.
In decades to come, a doorbell sign in Abergavenny could do a Halloween theme automatically because I made it so, even long after I am gone, maybe even long after the house is sold to someone else.
@revk Passing IoT devices over to new owners is currently an open issue. (Open research issue? Very likely.)
Even "inheriting" something as simple as an analogue phone line is difficult, and that has no local state. Handing over a broadband connection is also difficult - I've done the "transfer of billing" procedure with Zen a number of times, for example, and I still have some measure of administrative control over connections that haven't belonged to me for years.
@revk Handing over administrative control of a complicated system of routers, access points, some kind of uplink, possibly a Zigbee or Thread network, and a bunch of devices with local state currently can't be expected to work smoothly.
If I was the incoming owner/administrator I'd be expecting to wipe everything and start again at the very least.
A naive incoming owner wouldn't even know that that was needed. Expecting stuff to just keep working isn't really reasonable at the moment.
@steve I have IoT light switch controls but in the absence of the WiFi the physical light switch just works the light. I think that is a good downgrade that could be handed over. But in the general case it is a nightmare.
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