How to turn off the Mazda Connect watchdog (auto-reboot)

By default Mazda Connect’s Watchdog service restarts the CMU on any error, to the general public this is a god send as the Watchdog resolves common issues by rebooting the system (e.g. Navi going silent, any screen lock-ups, etc.) but for developers this can have the unintended action of locking us out of SSH access from a simple mistyped character.

Here’s how to turn the Mazda Connect Watchdog service off, keep in mind this command only persists until the Mazda Connect system is rebooted (e.g. after turning the engine off for a short period of time).

echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio/Watchdog\ Disable/value

You can check if the Watchdog service is now inactive by running:

cat /sys/class/gpio/Watchdog\ Disable/value

There are ample instructions online for how to set up the above command to persist even after rebooting but I won’t provide this here.

That’s it! 🙂