[Mesh] Meraki board watchdog

Hello mesh folks, I took some donated Sparky boards from Noisebridge with the intention to use them as wireless sensor nodes (environmental monitoring, etc) but while I can get OpenWRT installed I run into problems with the hardware watchdog rebooting the device every 5 minutes. It looks like OpenWRT includes support for the ar2315 watchdog but something isn't working. Have you all found a solution or workaround for this? Thanks, dana