How to confirm a pin is fried

Question

How do you confirm a pin has been damaged and is unable to work as a digital input?

I tried detecting a pushbutton (connecting ground to pin 11 with a pullup resistor enabled) on a fresh Arduino Uno and digitalRead() always registers 0, regardless of the pushbutton state.

To confirm it wasn't my pushbutton's wiring, I tested it on some other pins, and they register the button press perfectly. I then tested pin 11 as an output, and it was able to blink and LED just fine.

The Arduino's pretty new, and I don't remember doing anything with it that would have damaged anything, much less pin 11, but is it fair to say that pin has somehow been damaged? As far as I can tell, everything else on the Arduino works perfectly.

Answer 1

Yes, it sounds like that pin is fried.

You seem to have done all the things I would recommend:

1. Try your circuit on a different pin (works fine)
2. Try your circuit on the same (faulty) pin on a different microcontroller (works fine)

If you get different results between two chips that should be the same with the same code running on them then one of them is most likely faulty in some way, or has some other setting in it (fuse setting) that could be affecting it. I am not aware of any settings like that on the '328P, certainly none that you would change without knowing you had changed them.