paul mcdowell wrote:
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would optoisolation protect the I/0 from shorts and any other possible problems.


Well it depends where you think the problems will come from. If you are debugging a board with a processor and no "real world" I/O, then the buffers I described will at least protect the CPU. If you have lots of real world I/O, with switchng cruft etc etc etc, then optos are a possibility. Good, clean, Fast optical switching though is not particularly cheap or easy per pin.

But as Jacob says, you really can't beat sockets ! Unless you are using high precision A/D D/A type things

Steve