X10 Firecracker

Does anyone still make use of X10 powerline control devices? X10 has been largely replaced by more modern wifi based home automation devices, but I still have a few that control lighting.

I recently upgraded my main home/office server to Fedora 32. Fedora dropped python2 from new systems because python2 will be considered obsolete by the end of 2020. I have a serial based device called the X10 Firecracker which I use for wireless on/off control. The Firecracker is controlled by a python script run via crond, the system scheduler.

The script was written long ago by someone else in python2. While doing a post-upgrade checkout, I found that the firecracker.py script no longer functioned because I no longer had python2 installed on my system. So, it was time to port it to python3.

Fortunately, the porting effort was trivial. I have shared the results in my Github repository in case anyone else needs it. And if you’re still running any critical functions using python2 it is time to port them to python3.