I am now trying to run Mplayer on Tom Tom so that I can watch videos and drive anyone reading this to drink. I found however that Mplayer requires a lot of system resources that are being used by the Navigation application (ttn) So I needed a way to free up the memory and resources being used by the application. This should be as simple as just killing the application using
killall ttn
But the problem is that the ttn application is responsible for petting the dog. That is to say that there is a WatchDog Timer which resets the device after 15 seconds unless something continuously resets the timer.
All that was needed was a script to reset the timer instead, So here is my solution:
#!/bin/sh killall ttn && while(true) do echo '' > /dev/watchdog sleep 10 done
The trick is to kill the ttn but also keep the Watchdog from reseting the device. The script also has to be invoked as a background job, so I used an ‘&’ after the command.
./free.sh &
Giles Bathgate 
If it really resets the device after 10 seconds, then surely you want your sleep to be <10, otherwise you’ll get caught out sooner or later.
how do you run your script on the ttn , i have the tt720 and i cannot run the script from the console, i have tried creating a file called free.sh and saving it in the /mnt/sdcard/ dir but it returns cannot find .free.sh???
also do you know enough about scripting to include the watchdog reset routing in the gmplayer script, cheers, and thanks for publishing your results so faR.
actually i worked out how to run the script but now i get an error saying “3: syntax error: word unexpected (expecting do)
Have you tried running dos2unix on the file, if you made the file in windows and copied it to your TomTom you will have to run dos2unix to convert the carriage returns line feed (CrLf) to Unix style (the dos2unix command is on TomTom)
Well, you can use tomplayer (http://www.tomplayer.net) : it’s simpler 😉