On Sat, Apr 17, 2004 at 10:27:20PM -0700, John Pearson wrote:
> Is it okay to tie a general purpose I/O pin that is in a tri state directly
> to ground?

It's a recipie for a blown output driver.

>
> Will this cause higher power consuption?

No. But neither will the safer alternatives either.

Best) Make the pin an output and set to high or low. No power consumption.
OK) what you outlined above but with a pullup/pulldown resistor.

Software has a way of doing funky things. You should never trust it so
absolutely as to think that there's no chance that I/O pin may never get
flipped to an output. So my standing policy is never tie an unused I/O pin
directly to Vdd or Vss. I do one of the two things listed above.

BAJ

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