Well, if you set unused pins as outputs, you risk shorting them on your
exposed connector pins.

You may consider simply adding places to put SIP resisters (8 resisters
to a common wire in a 1x9 package).  As this is cmos we're talking about
you could even put 1M resisters in the circuit, and it would affect the
usage of the pins only a little with all the benefits of non-oscillating
cmos inputs.

Could be cheaper/smaller/easier to deal with than shunts.

-Adam

Chris Loiacono wrote:

>I am doing a board with a PIC18, on which I'm planning what I'm calling an
>expansion connector.
>Basically I want to bring all the unused I/O, along with some other pins to
>a connector that will allow me to make various daughter-boards that can be
>plugged-in as future options.
>
>Normally, I tie all unused I/O to Gnd. DOing this will be somewhat
>challenging, since any of these will be made useless for future use if this
>is done permanently. The options I can foresee are either shunt-jumpers to
>Gnd, or perhaps setting all the unused pins as outputs. The latter is
>something I have never tried. I'm hoping one of you has some insight to
>share on this.
>
>TIA,
>Chris
>
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