Soon I’m going for holidays and leave my Pi on its own. Thus, I made some precautions in case it froze (though after almost a month with it, I never had such a problem, but never say never). I’ve found a great tool, that would reboot my machine after it suddenly froze for any reason. This would soothe my nerves in case I wasn’t able to access my device and was wondering what might have happened (I’m not afraid the power might fail; not unless there was a nuclear war or a nasty sun burst that would destroy all electrical equipment – than we would be doomed and there would be no reason to worry about a small Pi).

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A watchdog timer is commonly found on embedded systems and is used to detect when the system is hung up on a task. Watchdog timer is basically a countdown timer counting  from some initial value down to zero. When zero is reached, the watchdog understands that the system has hung up and resets it automatically.

Thankfully, the Raspberry Pi’s BCM2835 SoC has a hardware-based watchdog timer on board. It is specially useful if you have a Raspberry Pi in a remote location (or a headless Pi) and the operating system hangs and there’s no one around to reboot it. How to enable the watchdog timer?

Full article here:
Raspberry Pi Watchdog Timer (The Unwritten Words)