Dual WatchDog Timer Board for ARM/Raspberry Pi

The WatchDog works as advertised; I'm using it to monitor a Raspberry Pi that's deployed outdoors and occasionally hangs up due to static electricity build-up. The people at SwitchDoc labs provide great support.

I was very excited about this product, primarily because it was the only one I could find -- I'm surprised that no one else makes 555 timer breakouts like this!If you look closely at the board, the component layout is a bit messy, and you can tell that whoever designed the PCB used the auto-routing feature of their PCB software for the traces and didn't actually put any real thought into what the traces should look like. But, it's not like this board will carry heavy current or be susceptible to noise issues, so it's not really a problem.So the only real problem I had with this is that the potentiometers used for adjusting the timeout are very difficult to tune. The instruction manual has an illustration on various positions for specific lengths of time, but they don't clarify what orientation the board has to be in for the potentiometers to line up with the illustration. To get these times like I wanted, I had to drag out my stopwatch and play the guessing game with the potentiometers. This took a lot of time and patience!Further, even though this board is supposed to be two separate timers, it seems like both potentiometers work in tandem rather than separately. For example, after I finally got Dog1 set for about 60 seconds, I started working on setting Dog2 to about 3 minutes. While adjusting Dog2, I noticed that Dog1 was no longer at 60 seconds. Is this a design flaw? Or was I mistaken about Dog1 being set right?And that's my point: I just couldn't trust that this was ever set right, and it was taking way too much time and trial/error to do it.Ultimately, I ended up abandoning this and creating my own watchdog timer.

works well, easy to setup. Couple suggestions: a) for the price the two halves of the board should really be separable, b) the board footprint is quite large nice to see it minimized, and c) it would be nice to have all the headers in one place so you can use a ribbon cable or breadboard.

Got a bunch of SwitchDoc parts for Christmas to build the weather station project. Dog 1 DOA. The Dog 1 capacitor was loose in the bag, not soldered to the board.

Was planning on using a bunch of these for a fairly large project I had but they do not seem to work with Pi v4, the SwitchDoc folks offered their best support "reference our 4-year-old blog post and figure it out yourself" needless to say I was not impressed by their staff.

Good product. Works as advertised. I have it hooked up to a Arduino with a complex program that would hang occasionally due to some conflict with the serial port every couple of days. This reboots it when that happens. I'm going to try it with a Raspberry Pi B++ next. I've never used the P6 reset port.