Check your 7805 and be certain it is grounded. I recently had much the same thing happen, heating my ICD, PIC and an LCD only to find the 7805 output was at +8.0. Peter H Anderson, http://www.phanderson.com, pha(at)phanderson.com PIC C, Serial ICDs ---- Begin Original Message ---- From: Jacob M Hartman Sent: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 01:27:46 -0500 To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: [PIC]: 16F877 draws huge current with minimal design I am having a serious problem getting started with the 16F877. =A0All t= he pins are pulled low (~10k resistors to ground) except for VSS and VDD, which are respectively connected to ground and +5V (coming out of a 780= 5, with a few caps to level the voltage). =A0Yet the chip draws around an = amp and starts heating.... =A0It's as if the VSS and VDD pins are internall= y shorted to each other. =A0I'm positive that everything is hooked up as described; e.g., I didn't swap the supplies to VSS and VDD, causing a s= hort through the protective diodes. =A0While I suspect that I've toasted thi= s chip, I'm wondering what I did wrong, in the interest of not toasting another one. =A0I'm also very curious what could cause such a critical internal short. Thank you, and have a happy new year! Jake -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body ---- End Original Message ---- Peter H. Anderson, pha@phanderson.com, http://www.phanderson.com Sign up for Free-for-Life E-mail at http://www.Africana.com -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body