ESP8266 with serial [Resolved]

Projects Programming
1

I am trying to use both Wi-Fi and serial on an ESP8266 and I am finding that if I send more than a few bytes to the serial port it makes the Wi-Fi unreliable. At this point all I am looking for is something along the lines of:

  1. 'Yes, they don't work well together and there is no fix'
    or
  2. 'Yes, they don't work well together but if you try ... then they work fine'
    or
  3. 'They should be fine together'.

At the moment I don't have a sketch that illustrates the problem that I'd be happy to post, as I what I have is untidy as I've been playing around adding bits, deleting bits etc. If the answer is 1 or 2 then, hopefully that will be enough. If the answer is 3 then I'll have to come back with a sketch that illustrates the problem.

The ESP8266s I have are these:
ESP8266
I have read the excellent [tutorial](http://"https://tttapa.github.io/ESP8266/Chap01 - ESP8266.html")
by Peiter P, and also seen some of his advice on here.
I am aware of:

serial.swap();

which moves serial TX/RX to pins GPIO15/GPIO13 instead of the USB port.

The symptoms are that if I send, say, 4 bytes to the serial port everything is fine. If I send a few more bytes, maybe 10 or 20, the Wi-Fi becomes erratic and unuseable.

I am also aware of:

yield();

but a liberal sprinkling of yields throughout the code makes no difference.

Answers 1, 2 or 3, along with general advice welcome at this point.

Thank you.

2

As far as i know it's '3' they should be fine, but turning interrupts 'off' at times will cause WiFi to become unreliable (or reliably not working) I mainly use ESP-01's and i send bytes back and forth between them and Arduinos without any issue.

3

Deva_Rishi:
As far as i know it's '3' they should be fine, but turning interrupts 'off' at times will cause WiFi to become unreliable (or reliably not working) I mainly use ESP-01's and i send bytes back and forth between them and Arduinos without any issue.

Thank you.

I was trying to put together a minimal sketch that exhibited the problem but then I ran into other problems, see
Unable to compile for ESP8266

Up to this point I was getting on really well with the ESP8266. About to try an MKR WiFi 1010....

4

Sort of resolved.

I created a new sketch to demonstrate the problem, but the new sketch doesn't have the problem. The main changes are that the new sketch is a lot tidier than the one I had the problem with and it uses ESP8266WiFi.h instead of ESP8266WiFiMulti.h.

Which of those things solved the problem, or whether something else I've changed solved the problem, I'm probably not going to find out.

Thank you for your help Deva_Rishi, ++Karma

5

You're welcome, btw i've never used

ESP8266WiFiMulti.h