Power switch?

I've only been using the Arduino board for a few days now, but I feel like its missing a power switch. I always get very nervous about plugging wires into a micro and find myself unplugging the usb cable every time need to make a hardware change.

Is this the wrong approach to working with the Arduino?

Rob311 I don't think I can count the # of times someone on this forum just plugged a LED direct from a digital IO to ground (without resistor) or fed the digital IO directly into a transistor's base without any current limit resistor.

In my experience a lot of other electronics "communities" seem to triple check everything etc. Here we just hack around and burn stuff out! Its like "guess and check" software development but for hardware. You can move a lot faster, learn a lot about how stuff goes wrong, and its lots of fun. For the most part the parts are cheap, and pretty good at protecting themselves.

Just rest your finger gently on the surface of the chips. If they get hot enough to burn your fingers pull the power fast, you probably accidently shorted Vcc to ground! :slight_smile:

And BTW, AFAIK there is an auto-reseting current limiting fuse in the USB.