AVR-Chat

Ok, cool.  Thank you all for your enthusiastic responses.

To summarize your ideas (and toss in a few new questions):

1) On the RESET pin, I should use a diode (and pull-up resistor) as
documented in Atmel AppNote AVR042.  They also have a capacitor in the
note, do you guys recommend that as well?

2) Dont waste B6 on a heartbeat, since that pin has too many other
alternative uses.  Perhaps A7? Then I'd only be losing an ADC, correct?

3) There's better voltage regulators than the 7805.  Well, for this
particular project, I'm going to stick to the age old "a voltage regulator
in the hand is better than two in the bush" and use the 7805 sitting in my
basement.  Any recommendations for the next time I'm in the mood to buy
some regulators that're in the same neighborhood as 7805?

4) No pull-ups needed on MOSI, MISO & SCK. I understand that they aren't
needed if I'm not using those 3 pins for general I/O use, but according to
the same AppNote mentioned above (AVR042), in figure 5 on page 6, they
recommend 4.7k resistors in between the pin and any I/O load.  SOOOOO,
even though I didnt connect anything in my schematic, let's pretend I was
going to use B0-2 for something else.  Do I need a resistor in the
following situations:
    * using a pin as output
    * using a pin as input
    * using a pin as PWM output
    * anything else?


Thank you all again for your constructive feedback.  This is extremely
helpful.

Ethan
www.bufbotics.org