Before the working week ends, we have prepared another useful article and video for you. This time we’ll teach you how to use the Watchdog to secure the firmware in Zerynth.

This small tutorial is made from the Zerynth Live Support video we held last week. We already featured one of the questions from it, in a post this week. You can take a look at it here.

What is a Watchdog?

Before you watch the video, perhaps you would like to learn what a Watchdog is. Or rather, learn more about it.

A Watchdog is an electronic timer. It is used to detect computer malfunctions, and recover the firmware from them. More precisely, it generates a system reset, if the main program does not service it in the pre-set time frame.

As Karim explained in the video:

“Watchdog is basically a timer that is being triggered every (set) period of time. If it, for some reason, hangs, and does not trigger the timer, or it does not fix the timer, it (the Watchdog) will the restart the firmware. It will make a soft reset.“

A Watchdog is usually implemented as a countdown timer that resets the microcontroller if it is not refreshed by firmware in a specified timeout period. The action of refreshing the watchdog timer is often called “kicking” or “feeding” the watchdog.

Zerynth Live Support

If you’re not all that familiar with Zerynth Live Support, here’s an overview.

For the past month, we have had live sessions almost every week on our YouTube channel. Considering that most of us are staying at home and trying to stay productive, we wanted to offer our users, and the embedded community, a way to communicate with us, and learn new things at the same time. 

So, during every Live Support session, we take 5 of the most interesting questions our users have asked on the Forum, and we answer them.

Of course, this is a great opportunity to use our Forum, and ask everything you’ve always wanted to know. Perhaps one of your questions will be featured in the next Live Support session.

Join our next session

You can join our next Live Support session on Tuesday, April 21st, at 4 pm, CET. Karim will be answering another set of popular questions from the Forum. Who knows – maybe he’ll be answering your question.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel

Subscribe to our YouTube channel today! Don’t miss out on all the great content we publish every week.

It’s not just the Live Support sessions that we’re offering – we also have an educational webinar program called Zerynth Continuous Learning. For this first webinar, Daniele Mazzei, our Co-founder, and Chief Innovation Officer talked about User Experience design in the context of IoT.