I wanted to do some waiting in a tight loop on the ESP8266, but that can lead to a watchdog timeout and a reset. I figured there must be a way to stop that but there isn’t anything in the documentation. Grepping the libs I found a couple of candidates and, after trying them all out, I found exactly what I was looking for – slop_wdt_feed. Declare the following in your header:

extern void slop_wdt_feed();

Now just call it in any long running loops or functions and it’ll keep the  dog off your back. Note this isn’t necessarily good practice!

At time of writing google returns exactly one result for this function name (just a listing of functions in the library) so I don’t think this is currently widely know.

Update: As of SDK v1.1.1 (possibly a little earlier) this no longer works. You can now use these (from Pete Scargill’s blog):

extern void pp_soft_wdt_stop();
extern void pp_soft_wdt_restart();