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If I have an Arduino, can I abruptly turn the power on and off without corrupting it? If I am designing a product that has an on/off switch, do I need to incorporate a delay before turning off the power so that the micro-controller can do a clean turn off of some sort? Or is it okay to just connect a SPST switch to the the Arduino's power line?

(By design a product, I mean using an ATmega with Arduino code interdependently on a custom board with other components.)

Yes, it is safe to abruptly shut off an Arduino.

Well, mostly safe.

The processors used in the various Arduinos have three types of memory:

1. Flash - Where your program is stored. Your program can read stuff from here, but cannot write it.




2. RAM - Where your program variables are kept while the program in running. The data here disappear when you turn the Arduino off. Your program reads and writes here constantly.




3. EEPROM - Where your program can store stuff it will need the next time it runs. Usually stuff that changes rarely, but is needed anytime the program runs. Like calibration data for a sensor.

Most programs only use Flash and RAM. You can switch the Arduino on and off any time you like with those programs.

If your program writes to EEPROM, then shutting off the power while writing to the EEPROM could corrupt the data there.

How that affects your program depends on what the data is.

If it corrupts the calibration data for a sensor, you would get bad measurements for whatever the sensor is detecting.

If you write checksums with your EEPROM data, then you could detect the corruption and your program could shut down instead of using bad data.

You, of course, would know if your program writes to the EEPROM - you have to load a seperate library and use special commands to read and write to the EEPROM area.

The danger is really only in that short moment when you write to the EEPROM. Since that happens rarely (and usually only under controlled conditions) it will also be rare to corrupt the EEPROM data.

Summary:

You can turn an Arduino on and off at will with no danger, unless you are using the EEPROM - and even then you will get away with it most of the time.

Yes, you can turn the power off quickly without corrupting it.

The only reason I can see for putting a delay into the power down of the circuit would be for safety or functional reasons of your external peripherals.

E.g. on power off, need to save data to non-volatile memory.
Or on power off, need to ensure a mechanism is in a safe position at power off.

This would require monitoring of the supply and having sufficient hold-up capacity to run the processor and what ever function that was required to be performed.

The term Arduino refers to a very broad spectrum of microcontroller boards that have
various different chips and affect of power loss thus varies. So, I would recommend you put the exact part no. of the ATmega chip being used. But in a general way for chips like ATmega328 the following holds good.

Yes, you can remove power from an Arduino without corrupting or damaging anything but do keep in mind the following things:

• If your code utilizes EEPROM then the flash might get corrupted or the data may not get stored accurately when the device is flashing data and power is removed.




• The only-way a sudden power loss can do harm apart from EEPROM is to the devices being used with Arduino (e.g. a SD card).