Error Handling and Robustness Questions

Designing firmware and system level mechanisms to detect, contain, and recover from faults and degraded conditions. Topics include watchdog timers and health monitoring, timeout and retry strategies, input validation and sanity checks, checksum and error detection for communication, graceful degradation and safe states, redundancy and fallback modes for critical components, brown out and power failure handling, and strategies for logging and telemetry within constrained storage and bandwidth. Also covers fault injection testing, automated recovery flows, clear diagnostic modes, and trade offs between availability, complexity, and predictable behavior.