A hard-reset abruptly halts all current operations and forces a system to reinitialize from its lowest hardware state. This is typically achieved by dropping the main power rail or asserting a hardware reset pin that clears all registers and stops the CPU clock. Engineers use it when a device is completely locked up and unresponsive to software commands.
Heard on the job
The microcontroller is stuck in an infinite loop and ignoring the debug interface, so just hard-reset the board by pulling the power barrel.
Also heard as
- cold boot
- power cycle