Reset a program from a ‘freeze’

While doing a test run on software for an incubator the software did fine, until suddenly on the ninth day weird things started to happen: the LCD showed some odd data and in spite of a low temperature the heating had not kicked in. I resetted the software, wondering what it could be but only an hour later again something off happened. This time in spite of the temperature being well over the upper limit, the heating was not switched off.
I checked my code, which really wasn’t so complicated: Read DSB1820, read DHT11, compare with high and low limit, switch a pin on or off and write the value to an LCD and I couldn’t find a single mistake and don’t forget, it had run flawlessly for 9 days. I suspected my display. This was a 20×4 LCD with I2C module with 4k7 pull up. Nevertheless there might still have been some ‘static’ on the SDA and SCL lines that supposedly can cause the Arduino to freeze.

Obviously that is not good if you are running an incubator as you dont want to check it and find your eggs boiled.
So, other than maybe straightening out the LCD cables a bit, I decided that I needed some software protection against ‘freezes’
The only (and possibly best) way to do this is with the watchdog timer. I dont want to go into the specifics and the background of the watchdog timer, but just keep it on a practical level.
What we do is to set-up the watchdog timer to initiate a system reset after say 4 seconds. Then in our loop we do a reset of the watchdog timer so it starts counting from zero again. So as long as the program tells the watchdog timer “I am still running” nothing will happen. Should the program freeze up, it will not reset the watchdog timer and then after 4 seconds the watchdog timer will reset the entire system.
It is very well possible to use the watchdog timer by manipulating the various registers yourself, but it is much simpler to use the watchdog libary that is part of the avr libraries.
We do this as follows:

#include <avr/wdt.h>

void setup()
{
	wdt_disable();
	//wdt_enable(WDTO_1S);// 1 sec
	wdt_enable(WDTO_2S);// 2 sec
	//wdt_enable(WDTO_4S);// 4 sec
	//wdt_enable(WDTO_8S);// 8 sec
}

void loop()
{
	wdt_reset();
	//  your program
	........
}

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