Raspberry Pi Watchdog....

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1

So, is setting up the Rpi watchdog: switchdoc.com/2014/11/reliab … pberry-pi/

…more trouble than it’s worth, or a good idea for a “hard to reach, hard to power-cycle” location?

2

Good idea for remote locations. The only thing is if it occurs with any regularity, you have a problem you need to fix – and not with a watchdog.

3

Agreed!

4

my eperience with a daily auto-reboot was better than with the watchdog …


#CRONJOB REBOOT 04:00:
sudo crontab -e
0 4 * * * /sbin/shutdown -r now
5

I use the reboot command daily on my RPI3s. Not sure why they have had so many problems but it seems to have fixed the issue.
I lost 4-5 SD cards before I made the change. My RPI2 has not had an issue.
The P.S. are 2+ Amps.

sudo crontab -e
05 03 * * * /sbin/reboot
Same effect as /sbin/shutdown -r now
Just take care what system time is used. Is it UTC/GMT or local time.

A scheduled reboot cleanly downs the file system.

6

Do you have any residual overclocking directives in /boot/config.txt? If so, maybe they could be contributing to instability. My RPi3 has been rock solid but, since I transferred the SD card from a Pi2, it still had the settings from raspi-config in config.txt and I had to remove them.

7

Ironically I set up the watchdog an hour before this thread was posted. I don’t have much instability, but every few days I’d have a crash - which is annoying when I’m at work.

I had been using a WeMo switch to initiate a hard-reboot to fix these things but that comes with its own problems.

Haven’t seen the watchdog fire off yet, but I’ll let you guys know how it goes.

8

I’ve been using hardware WatchDog timers for years. It’s not just the possible issue of a programming bug that can hang an embedded system. Power line surges, electromagnetic noise (read radio waves) from long line and, especially with a complex OS like the Raspberry Pi and ESP8266, some deep down kernel or driver hanging completely independent of your own code.

The SwitchDoc guy wrote some good tutorials on the whole topic: switchdoc.com/2014/11/reliab … -arduinos/

By the way, they just released a new version that is smaller an has a Grove connector on the board. Makes for easier hookups.

Jerry