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I see AVR-8 microcontrollers in many devices (continuous hot water heaters) and as an Arduinio fan I can totally see places where they could be used: for instance to drive a gas pump including the buttons, measurements, valves, mag stripe readers and serial link for credit card payments and/or remote control by the clerks.

Rumor has it Russia was importing washing machines so it could extract microcontrollers to put into weapons.

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I'd have a hard time imagining gas pumps using just an AVR, because they have some pretty large LCD screens and fancy cryptography for tap to pay.

And I'd imagine anything that big and expensive would use Ethernet or something, rather than messing around with any low level serial link business.

But one could just make an embedded Linux based controller as one of the standard modules.

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