How to Destroy an Arduino

http://ruggedcircuits.com/html/ancp01.html

by harrydoukas • 14 years ago

72 30 14 years ago

ruggedcircuits.com

pravda2• 14 years ago

Well, none of these methods is sufficient to destroy the Arduino, you will just destroy the ($2.50) AVR.

I would certainly recommend using the UNO or earlier revision with the socketed AVR.

Then you can have a couple of spare ATmega328's for backup.

dfox2• 14 years ago

One thing that always bugged me about $30 arduino is that it is mostly nothing else than $2.50 AVR

jrockway7• 14 years ago

And a crystal, header blocks, USB port, voltage regulator, power jack, and some other small components. Not to mention shipping cost, etching the PCBs, drilling the PCBs, the cost to buy the pick-and-place machine and reflow machine, QA, maintaining the website, ...

You can certainly have AVR applications that cost less than $20, but there is a fair amount of cost in producing a development board. (You say $30 but there are plenty of sub-$20 Arduino clones.)

pravda2• 14 years ago

That's actually the nice thing about it. After you've designed and debugged your project on the Arduino board, you can implement it with a $2.50 AVR (+ a few support items).

You can't do that with, for example, the Raspberry PI or the Netduino.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

You missed the good part. You can replace the 'CPU' on your $30 mainboard for less than $3. That's why I like the socketed versions.

gregable• 14 years ago

Great way to do marketing. It's not only interesting and engaging, but also actually useful regardless of whether or not you buy their product.

jrockway7• 14 years ago

Despite all this, I've never been able to damage an AVR. Either I am very careful in my old age, or the stock AVRs are a bit more durable than this article would lead you to believe. I'm sure I've shorted a pin to ground while set to high, for example, because it's a one-byte programming error to do so.

gorloth• 14 years ago

I've had similar experiences with AVRs, they are quite robust and will handle shorts, reversed polarities and the like rather well. They seem to be rather conservative on the datasheets probably as they are guaranteed over a much larger temperature range than most people use their chips at.

SpacemanSpiff• 14 years ago

Agreed. I've done all kinds of accidental abuse to AVRs, shorting outputs while testing, powering an entire circuit through the USART pins, switching the PDI connector on an XMEGA (3.3V) with a +5V USB connector, that sort of thing. They seem to be quite resilient. A classmate of mine apparently had a 5V AVR powered by +12V for quite some time in one of his projects when the voltage regulator silently failed. Apparently it operated for several days like this. My favorite discussion about the resilience of the AVR comes from 26C3 "Advanced Microcontroller Programming", available here on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... "You can zap 15kV spikes into the clock inputs and it will continue to run..."

ComputerGuru4• 14 years ago

Is #10 actually going to destroy the AVR?

Method #10: Exceed Total Microcontroller Current

I'd imagine it would just temporarily disable it, but disconnecting the extra draw would put things right again... I don't think undervoltage or undercurrent physically damages the AVR?

jrockway7• 14 years ago

All drawing current does is cause components to heat up. Too much heat and the components start vaporizing, and then they don't work anymore because they no longer exist. (The effects may be more subtle than this, of course.)

So yes, it's definitely possible to damage a microcontroller in this way, but I'm not convinced it's as easy as the article suggests. (I'd try on an ATtiny right now and see, but my stash is at work.)

ComputerGuru4• 14 years ago

If, as a result of the voltage and current regultors in the AVR, the AVR only sources X amount of current, adding load past that point will not magically introduce more current (and thus, heat) into the equation, though... Assuming the maximum supported load is also the maximum physically available, the maximum heat generated should be tolerated OK.

PedroDiogo_• 14 years ago

I have one extra ATMega168 and I will test some of these methods but I'm not sure if you can kill one of these chips just by doing some of these methods.

All I can say is that once, while programming one of these ATMegas, I accidentally swapped VDD and GND and left it there for 2/3 minutes. The chip got very hot and I burnt my finger but once I left the chip cool I was able to program it again and after 2 years it is still working.

quasse• 14 years ago

>> Method #4: Apply External Vin Power Backwards

I know this one isn't true, because I did this last night with no ill effect. I accidently connected a 9V power brick with the leads reversed. Nothing happened, the Arduino just doesn't turn on until you reverse the leads.

DHowett• 14 years ago

This article is literally ten instances of "How to destroy an IC: apply power where power does not belong, or apply too much power where less power belongs." with marketing piled on top of it. To be fair, if you did any of these things directly to the AVR powering a ruggeduino, the exact same thing would happen.

I'd not have been surprised to see "apply 120V AC to Vin/Vcc" on this list, simply for the common sense involved in such a statement.

Too2• 14 years ago

The arduino might be a development board but the way i see it, the IO-pins does not have to be be a 1:1 mapping to the IC-pins. I want it to be a safe and reliable, general purpose IO-unit. For that, applying these fixes saves you from many accidental mis-connections.

Too2• 14 years ago

Awesome article. Shows some common failure scenarios of a real product, explains exactly what will happen and proposes an easily understandable solution.

One of the best electronic lessons i've read for a long time. Finally makes you realize why most pcbs has all those weird components sitting around instead of just pushing the io-pins straight into the µC.

While the avr might be able to handle some of the failures in certain scenarios it's still good to know how to protect yourself in case you use another controller or if you really want to be on the safe side.

How to Destroy an Arduino

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