Introduction

Use a sledgehammer, fire a bullet at it, throw it into a pool....that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re going to show you how to electrically destroy your Arduino, though many of you seem to already know how to do that through unfortunate experience. You know what we mean....that funny smell, the scorch mark on a component, or the dreaded “programmer not in sync” error message -- all signs that you’ve just learned a lesson the hard way.

Why are we doing this? If you own an Arduino, it’s good to know what is and what isn’t OK to do with it. We also want you to consider buying our Ruggeduino, which will survive all of the tortures described below.

Method #1: Shorting I/O Pins to Ground

HOW

Configure an I/O pin to be an output then set it high. Short the pin to ground. You have now created an overcurrent condition on the I/O pin and it will be destroyed.

WHY

Here is the path of current flow (the schematic is for the Arduino Uno, which can be found here):