From:  <[email protected]>
Reply-To:  <[email protected]>
Date:  Saturday, March 22, 2014 at 10:08 AM
To:  <[email protected]>
Subject:  [beagleboard] Hardware watchdog for BBB

> HI, I have been working for a wile on safe power supply for BBB with backup
> power provided by supercapacitors. In case of power failure there is  just
> enough  time to safely and nicely shut down BBB. For some reason BBB does not
> always wake up fully. I need hardware dogwatch. Did anybody design such a
> thing? I was able to find some design for ardunio:
> http://www.playwitharduino.com/?p=291.
> Anybody has any experience with hardware dogwatch for BBB??
> Thanks in advance
> Robert
Hi Robert,

>  
Developing a power supply that ensures a reliable shutdown down in the event
of a power failure isn¹t a simple design. You really need to monitor the
input power supply and the state of the kernel to determine when to remove
and reapply power to the BBB. You have to consider the corner cases such as:
1. power failure could occur during the boot up sequence
2. power failure occurred, triggering a shutdown sequence and then power is
restored during the shutdown sequence.
With Linux, you cannot arbitrarily remove power during the boot up sequence
and you cannot simply reapply power during the power down sequence. In the
first case, when would it be safe to simply remove power to the BBB and in
the second case, when would it be safe to recycle the power to the BBB.
Currently there is no external info to determine the state of the kernel so
you would have to add a kernel driver which will control a GPIO to signal
when the kernel is in a safe mode (all volatile info written to non-volatile
memory) and also monitor a GPIO used to interrupt the kernel when a power
failure occurs. 

So now, you need an external state machine which tracks the input power
supply, state-of-kernel and charge state of super caps. Timers are also
required to ensure a proper power recycle.

I hope I have covered everything you need to consider in your design, but
perhaps others has some insights I haven¹t considered.

Regards,
John
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