There are situations where it would be useful to be able to force a device reset after successful programming (via software, not the reset pin).
The sort of situation I'm thinking about is where the bootloader is started using the 'reinvoke ISP' command from within the application. This allows the firmware upgrade process to be started down a serial link (via a serial command to the app software to invoke the bootloader), but there is then no way to remotely get out again.
I've done a couple of jobs recently where we temporarily installed a radio modem for remote configuring and diagnostics, and the ability to also reprogram firmware over the same link without writing our own IAP code would be nice.
This could be achieved fairly easily by downloading & executing a short piece of code that switched on the watchdog and allowed it to time out. (This would be preferable to a simple branch to 0 as it ensures all hardware is in its normal reset state)
Good idea. I wonder if such a piece of code would execute from RAM. I will add this to the wish list.
Andy