ESP8266 Community Forum

- Sun Nov 15, 2020 2:13 pm #89459 Hi,
Could someone explain why you would need to use softwareSerial instead of Serial when connecting to an Arduino? What are the problems with using hardware serial on the ESP8266?
Thanks,
Yarbles

- Mon Nov 16, 2020 9:18 am #89475 There are no problems in principle using the default hardware serial on the esp8266. Why do you think you need to use the software serial.

Development boards like a NodeMCU do have an inbuilt USB serial chip connected to the hardware serial port which one might think precludes using the port to connect to some other device but there is a series resistor to the RX which means it is possible for an external interface to override the signal from the on board serial.

Raw boards like ESP-12 or ESP-01 do not have the inbuilt development serial interface so there is no conflict at all after code has been uploaded.

- Mon Nov 16, 2020 7:57 pm #89480 Thanks for the info. I was curious because all the examples I found used software serial to connect to a single Arduino. None said why.