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 co

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=JV3BJo1JAeQ#t=2690s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... "You can zap 15kV spikes into the clock inputs and it will continue to run..."