SLAU533D September 2013 – April 2017
The MSP430 contains a watchdog timer that is enabled by default. After a reset, an MSP430 application has approximately 32 ms to either reconfigure the watchdog or put it on hold. Otherwise, the watchdog resets the MSP430 device.
Watchdogs are an important part of writing robust production-level code, but if you are only experimenting with the MCU, it is not helpful and can be obstructive. For this reason, the first line of code on many bench applications is to simply disable the watchdog by setting the WDTHOLD bit.