Code and Life

Programming, electronics and other cool tech stuff

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Default feed not disabled with Suffusion

I switched to a new WordPress theme, Suffusion! Hooray! However, the %#&/?! default feed link is added to HTML even if disable it in Suffusion settings. Not hooray.

Digging into Suffusion code, I found suffusion_include_default_feed() from functions/actions.php, but it seems that it correctly does not output anything when I disable the default feed. Furthermore, the alternate feed URL actually does output my FeedBurner feed URL. So it seems Suffusion is not generating these links by itself.

Grepping around the WordPress source code (a look through the dozens of templating PHP files really makes me want to code a barebones blog myself) I finally located the culprit: feed_links() method in wp-includes/general-template.php. Why is this called? Where should it not be called?

It seems at least wp-includes/default-filters.php is adding this feed_links action to wp_head. I commented it out, and what do you know, the nerve-wrecking automatic feed URLs are gone!

Just thought to share it if someone else is having the same problem. It looks like Suffusion should have the following somewhere if default feeds are disabled:


remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );

It seems Suffusion is adding a ton of actions and filters in its functions.php, namely in function suffusion_setup_custom_actions_and_filters(). So here’s a patch which gets rid of that default feed URL if you have chosen to disable it in Suffusion setup:


function suffusion_setup_custom_actions_and_filters() {
    // Theme supports automatic feed links, which makes WordPress output default 
    // RSS feed links via feed_links action. Disable this if the user has explicitly
    // chosen in Suffusion setup to disable those very feeds.
    global $suf_custom_default_rss_enabled;
    
    if ($suf_custom_default_rss_enabled != 'enabled') {
        remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );
    }
    
    ///// ACTIONS

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V-USB with ATtiny45 / ATtiny85 without a crystal

One guy at Hack a Day remarked on the long wire runs in my V-USB tutorial breadboard setup. So I thought I’d build upon the part 4 of the tutorial but modify the setup a bit to run the AVR at 5 volts and use zener diodes to drop D+/D- voltage, thus eliminating the need for a regulator. And why not stop there. ATtiny45 and ATtiny85 are smaller than ATtiny2313 and have an internal oscillator that can be calibrated to provide 16.5 MHz clock, accurate enough for V-USB to do its magic. I challenge anyone to drastically shorten these wire runs!

In the photo, I used a 4-pin header to show the place of the USB cable so the zener diodes would not get obstructed. Note that due to the angle it can seem like the 0.1 uF tantalum cap (light brown one) is wired to PB4 when it really is going to GND pin! Here’s the schematic, heavily borrowed from V-USB’s EasyLogger reference implementation:

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Dissecting the Excalibur Game Time Chess Clock

A go-playing friend of mine had a broken “Excalibur” chess clock that we here in Europe use extensively in go tournaments. The LCD was shattered and I don’t think they ship replacement parts:

Because the clock is not of much use without a display, I got to rip it apart to see what it contains. This particular clock is used quite a lot, so I thought I’d share the images. Note that you can click on pictures to view larger version of the image.

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PicoScope 2204 USB Oscilloscope Review

PicoScope 2204 USB scope

One of the nicest things when starting a new hobby is that there’s just so many things you don’t yet have, and can thus look forward to researching and then maybe buying if the price is right. In electronics, you can pretty much get started with a $10 soldering iron, $25 multimeter, maybe a $30 programmer if you want to use microcontrollers, and then just buy cheap components to tinker with. But sooner or later, you start thinking about how nice it would be if you had an oscilloscope.

For me it took about nine months. I saw an article on using AVR as an RFID tag and noticed I could build a simple RFID reader with a few components. However, to really learn something, it would be nice to actually see the 125 kHz RFID carrier wave instead of fumbling blindly with the schematics. Additionally, I could use the scope to verify DIY D/A circuits, maybe debug serial protocols and much more. So I started researching.

Getting a used analog or digital scope from eBay was of course one option. However, old scopes are big, clunky and I don’t really have much table space. And if the scope fell out of use, it would be wasting space in a closet. New Chinese-made digital scopes from Owon and Rigol looked good and were relatively small and light. However, they had 640×480 or 800×600 displays and I had 2560×1600 30″ monitor sitting on my workspace, and being more of a software person, I eventually decided against them and chose to get a PC scope instead.

Options in USB scopes

Going through the options for digital scopes, there seemed to be a few price brackets:

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8 bit and 4 bit LCD interfacing with ATtiny

Since my brief journey to controlling LCD display directly with ATtiny2313 I purchased a display with Hitachi HD44780 compatible driver chip. The web is already pretty full of LCD tutorials and libraries, but most seemed to either skip details and rely on external libraries, or were just overly complex. So I decided it wouldn’t hurt to share the rather short (and functionally limited) versions I came up with.

8-bit mode

In 8-bit mode, you will be needing 8 pins for sending or reading a whole byte of data at once, and 3 control lines: enable (EN), register select (RS), and read/write (RW). Basic procedure is to prepare all other lines, and then pulse the enable line high for a short while in which LCD reads your command (when RW is low) or writes data (when RW is high). For control messages, RS line is low, and for writing letters, RS line is high.

I started with ATtiny2313 and used the 8 pins in port B as LCD data lines, and PD4, PD5, and PD6 as RW, RS, and EN, respectively. With such a setup, working write command became:

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V-USB tutorial continued: HID mouse

Wow, my AVR ATtiny USB tutorial here I got featured in Hack a Day! Motivated by the influx of readers, I decided to find out how to make a USB HID (human interface device) mouse.

V-USB examples already contain an example of this, so I digged in to see what is different in usbconfig.h compared to the one we finished in my tutorial. It seems only a few things need changing:

  1. USB_CFG_HAVE_INTRIN_ENDPOINT needs to be set to have an additional endpoint
  2. USB_CFG_INTR_POLL_INTERVAL set to 100 ms instead of 10 in template
  3. USB_CFG_IMPLEMENT_FN_WRITE is not needed, nor is …FN_READ (define both to 0)
  4. Device ID and name need to be changed. I’ll just use the same ID as they did
  5. USB_CFG_DEVICE_CLASS is set to 0, not 0xff
  6. USB_CFG_INTERFACE_CLASS set to 3 instead of 0
  7. USB_CFG_HID_REPORT_DESCRIPTOR_LENGTH defined to match the structure’s length

That’s it! So here are the defines I changed:


#define USB_CFG_HAVE_INTRIN_ENDPOINT    1
#define USB_CFG_INTR_POLL_INTERVAL      100
#define USB_CFG_IMPLEMENT_FN_WRITE      0
#define USB_CFG_IMPLEMENT_FN_READ       0
#define USB_CFG_DEVICE_ID               0xe8, 0x03
#define USB_CFG_DEVICE_NAME     'M', 'o', 'u', 's', 'e'
#define USB_CFG_DEVICE_NAME_LEN 5
#define USB_CFG_DEVICE_CLASS        0
#define USB_CFG_INTERFACE_CLASS     3
#define USB_CFG_HID_REPORT_DESCRIPTOR_LENGTH    52

OK. So what about main.c? Turns out the changes are rather straightforward:

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