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Israel, Jerusalem
1 Level
670 Review
52 Karma

Review on πŸ•’ Dual WatchDog Timer Board for ARM/Raspberry Pi: Introducing SwitchDoc Labs' Advanced Fault Monitoring Solution by Joe Roberts

Revainrating 2 out of 5

Extremely difficult to set the time

I was very excited about this product, mainly because it was the only one I could find - I'm surprised no one else has a 555 break timer like If you look closely at the board you can see that the layout of the components is a bit messy and you can tell that whoever designed the board used the auto-routing feature of their PCB trace software used and didn't really think about it. what the tracks should look like. But that doesn't mean this board carries a lot of current or is prone to noise, so that's not an issue. The only real problem I had was that the potentiometers used to set the timeout are very difficult to set up. The manual has pictures of different positions for specific periods of time, but they don't explain what orientation the board needs to be in order for the potentiometers to match the picture. To get the times I wanted, I had to pull out the stopwatch and play a guessing game with the potentiometers. It took a lot of time and patience! Even though this board is supposed to have two separate timers, the two potentiometers seem to work in tandem rather than individually. For example, after finally setting Dog1 to about 60 seconds, I started setting Dog2 to about 3 minutes. When setting up Dog2, I noticed that Dog1 is no longer equal to 60 seconds. Is that a design flaw? Or am I wrong that Dog1 is configured correctly? And that's my point: I just couldn't believe it was ever set up properly and it took way too much time and trial/error. In the end I gave up and created my own watchdog.

Pros
  • Delivery was very fast
Cons
  • There are problems