5 Ways to Destroy an Arduino

hi I hope you're doing great thank you so much for joining me this week you know nothing feels worse than getting a brand new Arduino board and then destroying it within the first five minutes of plugging the thing in in this episode we're going to talk about five mistakes you can make that can easily damage your Arduino board with the whole intent that you can avoid them we'll also talk about an Arduino Uno derivative board that protects against each of these mistakes everything has limits if you try to drive a semi trailer full of gold bars over some tiny country bridge you could probably exceed the weight limit of the bridge destroying the bridge and probably really screwing up the semi to mean the gold bars would probably be fine but I think you get the idea you know or if you're driving your car at 100 miles per hour and you try to stop it within 10 feet of a brick wall well you're probably gonna get all smashed up and it's not the cars fault it has certain limits it has to be operated within the Arduino is really no different it has limits that it has to be operated within in this video we're going to discuss some of those limits and the results of exceeding them if you know the limits if you're equipped with that knowledge then you'll be able to protect yourself from making mistakes and exceeding those limits now all of the material that we're going to cover in this video is based on a really great article written by the manufacturers of rugged Duino so rugged we know is a US company that sells in our dwee No uno derivative board which protects against everything that we're going to be talking about in this video it's kind of like the superhero of Arduino derivative boards it's pretty much invincible it prevents simple mistakes from damaging the board now the article that rugged we know wrote is relatively in-depth on the technical aspects of why doing a certain thing can damage an Arduino but I'm going to keep this video more focused for a beginner so we're basically going to discuss mostly hate what not to do and if you want to know or the details of why not to do it I'll make sure to link to the article in the description below so the first thing we'll talk about is putting too much current through an Arduino io pin so IO stands for input output and what we're referring to are the digital pins 0 through 13 and the analog pins a 0 through a 5 so those are all the i/o pins on your Arduino if we go to the Arduino Uno product page on the air between a website and we come down to the specification summary it says DC current / io pin and it says it's 40 milliamps well this is actually a limit of the microcontroller that the earth we know uses it's a maximum current flow that is specified on that microcontrollers datasheet so if we allow more than 40 milliamps of current to flow through any one of those i/o pins then what you'll do is end up destroying the pin you won't be able to use that pin anymore for inputting voltage you're outputting voltage it's it's going to be kaput so there's essentially two ways that you could do this by accident the first way is to connect an eye open that's been set as an output using the pin mode function and then you write that output high using digital write and then you accidentally connect that pin directly to one of the ground pins on the Arduino so what happens is this creates an over current condition on that pin now here's why if we look at owns law we can calculate the current moving through the pin you know when the voltage is set is high on an Arduino pin it delivers 5 volts now the internal resistance of an art of an Arduino io pin is about 25 ohms so that means that the current is around 0.2 amps or 200 milliamps which is significantly over the 40 milliamp current for that pin that we just talked about without a current limiting resistor between the i/o pin and ground we exceed the maximum allowable current flow and wham-o the pins fried so setting pins as outputs and writing them high is something we do all the time you know when we're using Arduino so this is probably the most common mistake that could happen when you've got you know a ground rail and a voltage rail on a breadboard and you're kind of prototyping around this is something you definitely want to look out for is not directly connecting one of those io pins to ground another way to create an overcurrent condition is if you have to IO pins set as outputs so again pin mode set his output for two different IO pins and then you write one high that be five volts and then the other low ground voltage and then you connect them together so you've essentially done the exact same thing as before by driving too much current through the pins but now instead of losing just one eye open you've actually destroyed two here again setting some pins high and some pins low are something you're going to do all the time using Arduino so you'll definitely want to keep an eye out for making this mistake so the rugged we know that we talked about before it has built-in protection against this type of over current condition it's got a thirty milliamp resettable fuse in series with every single eye open so far we've talked about over current conditions but there's also an over voltage condition that can do damage if we look at the datasheet of the microcontroller that the Arduino uses there's a section that's called absolute maximum ratings and on here we see this section where it says voltage on any pin except reset with respect to ground and then it says it's negative 0.5 volts to VCC plus 0.5 volts so for our purposes we're gonna say VCC is 5 volts any time you exceed 5.5 volts on a pin you can damage that pin and you can do more than just damage the pin so if you're working with some components that you're powering with a separate power source and then you allow say let's say you're using like a 9-volt battery to power something else if you allow that power that if you allow that nine volts to be applied to one of the i/o pins then you can damage that pin and the actual damage is going to depend it depends on how the fail occurs in some cases you're just going to lose the pin and that's the good situation but you could also screw up other components too like the USB interface chip so you definitely don't apply more than five point five volts to any of the i/o pins on the Arduino so the rugged we know board is also able to protect against an over-voltage condition to any of the i/o pins like I said it's kind of bulletproof at some point in your adventures with Arduino you're going to want to power your Arduino a way from a computer you know without the USB cable and so you know one common method is to say use a 9-volt battery and you could either plug the 9-volt battery into the power jack or you can actually plug the terminals directly in to the Arduino headers in the VN and the ground so the positive voltage of the battery so that positive terminal goes to V in and the negative terminal goes to ground but if you switch those pins so instead of having the positive going to be in but instead you have the positive going to ground so if you mistakenly do this you pretty much gonna fry the microcontroller and the 5 volt regulators on the Arduino boards also going to be destroyed so you don't want to do that and as you probably guessed it the rugged we know will actually protect against this reversing of voltages and it will do that up to 30 volts which is pretty impressive now the final way that you can have a bad day with your do we know that we're going to talk about today is if you apply greater than 5 volts to the 5 volt pin on the Arduino now you might be wondering well why would I ever put 5 volts on you know greater than 5 volts on that 5 volt pin that just doesn't make sense and you're right it doesn't make sense you wouldn't normally do that but this is really about mistakes that you can make you can inadvertently do something maybe you were you know trying to get one of the pins into ground to complete a circuit or something like that that's when these mistakes can happen so that's kind of what we're talking about here this isn't something that you would necessarily easily do but it's definitely something that can fry your Arduino board so this just goes back to the limits of the microcontroller remember we're not supposed to apply more than VCC plus point 5 volts to any of the pins and that includes that 5 volt pins so not something you would normally do not something you'd want to do but something that could definitely happen and you know make a bad day for you and it's no surprise the rugged we know is designed to resist this so it actually has a voltage cutoff circuit that makes sure that if you have the 5 volt connector pin that actually gets disconnected if the voltage exceeds 5 point 5 volts alright so let's do a quick review of what not to do don't take an hour dwee no IO pin have it set to high and then connect it directly to ground don't take an Arduino io pin set to high and connect it to another Arduino io pin set to low again not a good idea don't apply a voltage exceeding 5 point 5 volts to any of the io pins it's going to destroy those pins if you're going to apply power to the Arduino through the VN header connectors make sure not to reverse the polarity of the VN ground power connections do not apply greater than 5 volts to the 5 volt connector pin on the Arduino alright well hey I hope this video was helpful I hope that you can avoid all these mistakes I really appreciate you taking the time to watch this week I do have if you're interested in learning about Arduino our open source hardware group website you can go there and sign up for a free course to learn about our do we know it really kind of walks you step-by-step through getting familiar with the hardware and the software we also offer a premium course that really takes you from not knowing anything about electronics or programming walks you through and really sets you up so you can do a lot of neat stuff well thanks again for listening to the show next time we meet we'll actually be talking about 5 more ways we can destroy an Arduino and that should be next week so I look forward to seeing you then have a great day bye you

Channel: Programming Electronics Academy

Views: 127,973

Rating: 4.5948615 out of 5

Keywords: Arduino(Brand), Arduino Tutorial, Arduino Lesson, Learning Arduino, Electronics, Arduino IDE, Arduino Sketch, Computer programming, rugged circuits, ruggeduino, destroy an arduino, damage arduino, arduino pin, damaged arduino pin, overvoltage, overcurrent, reverse polarity, i/o pin, input/output pin, arduino derivative, arduino limits, arduino datasheet, arduino specifications, arduino uno specifications, dont do this, electronics repair, arduino uno programming

Id: WmcMrKELkcs

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

looks like an advert for the rugged arduino to me.

[u/birdbrainlabs]

Or you could get twice as many ways, and not watch a 10 minute video: http://www.ruggedcircuits.com/10-ways-to-destroy-an-arduino/

[u/[deleted]]

Such a horrible video and annoying voice, I couldn't make through the first few scenes.

[u/cjwelborn]

Nice video. I wish I had seen this when I first got my arduinos. The ruggeduino looks cool too.