How to Enable or Disable the Watchdog Timer of a PIC Microcontroller in C
In this article, we show how to enable or disable the watchdog timer of a PIC microcontroller in the C programming language.
The watchdog timer is a part of a microcontroller that will automatically reset an embedded device that hangs because of a software or hardware fault. It is meant to reset a computer system after some type of crash related to either hardware or software.
Enabling a watchdog timer can be useful in systems in certain cases. It can restart a system in the event of any interrupt that can halt an otherwise functioning system.
In other events, when dealing with system crashes is not necessary, the watchdog timer can be disabled. If the software isn't optimized for functioning with the watchdog timer, it can unintended reset a software system where this is not wanted. Thus, if dealing with system resets is not necessary, it can be shut off.
We can enable or disable a watchdog timer in the configuration bit settings in our code.
To enable a watchdog timer, we can place the following line at the top of our C code (before
the main function).
The watchdog timer is now enable and the program can be enabled to restart or reset if there is some anamoly in the software or hardware.
To disable the watchdog timer, we set the value to Off. Thus, the system will never
restart or reset based on the watchdog timer.
Configuration bit settings help us to navigate and work with embedded systems by specifying configuration values, such as the watchdog timer.
There are many other configuration settings we can set, which we show in other articles.
And this is how to enable or disable the watchdog timer of a PIC microcontroller in
C.
Related Resources
How to Set the Ports of a PIC Microcontroller in C