Sure (this is what I have in my /sbin/preinit code - I haven't kept up with this recovery console thing - perhaps it supports everything I have done, and more, by now, but if you're lacking a 5 second press-any-key-to-get-shell countdown to get a shell at the earliest possible moment of boot, with the keyboard LEDs backlit when you're in said shell in case you have to use it in the dark, the instructions for what I did should be earlier in this thread).

Anyway, this is the useage:
Remember, there are two watchdogs on the N900 (maybe more, idk, but these are the ones that make the device reboot if they're not given a good punt every ~30 seconds or so [EDIT: but I'm fairly confident it's only those 2]).

The '-t #' flag tells the watchdog command how often to prod the specified watchdog (in seconds). Last I checked (half a year ago or so) Pali's watchdogs binary used a 10 second interval, but I personally think there's no need for it to be that frequent, so I use 20 in my /sbin/preinit and never had a spontaneous reboot. I would assume, you could probably safely set the interval to 1 second less than the watchdogs' how-long-before-reboot timer, but I never felt the desire to push the limits.

Either way the CPU/battery difference between doing a 10 sec interval and a 20 sec interval, is virtually nothing, so just a matter of how much time you feel is appropriate for completely-safe-ness.

The real number of completely-safe-from-watchdog-reboot seconds is likely to be far closer to the actual 'reboot-if-not-kicked-at-this-time', given speed of computers, than seems intuitive to the human brain anyway.

Shouldn't make a difference? I currently have 2 N900's, one of which has R&D mode on and the watchdogs disabled, and the other of which has R&D Mode off.

I use my /sbin/preinit mod on both with the above commands, and haven't had a watchdog problem with either? To the best of my knowledge, the one with watchdogs disabled does not end up with those watchdogs started on occasions when I use my at-boot shell during boot. (I don't know of any commands/tools to check, but will be happy to do said checking if told how.)

EDIT: Sorry, made a typo: That's "twl4030_wdt", not "tw14030_wdt".