Sparkfun ESP8266 Wifi Shield Examples not compiling for Sparkfun Redboard Turbo

Wireless & IoT Wifi
1

I purchased a Turbo so that I could have a little more program space to run an IoT project where the Redboard needed a lot of memory: Wifi plus a lot of sensors doing data logging.

Unfortunately, when I try to compile the ESP8266 Wifi Shield Examples I get a compile error:

ESP8266_Shield_Demo:29:29: fatal error: SoftwareSerial.h: No such file or directory
 #include <SoftwareSerial.h> 
                             ^
compilation terminated.
exit status 1
SoftwareSerial.h: No such file or directory

Since this is a SAMD board, the SoftwareSerial.h library is not included. Which would be fine if the WiFi Shield’s libraries were not dependent on SoftwareSerial.h. SparkFunESP8266WiFi.h references it straight away and there doesn’t seem to be a way around it. I tried using SoftwareSerial.h and the required util library from AVR but I got a verbose error saying it wouldn’t work on SAMD. A 3rd party version of Software Serial that worked on SAMD would be great, but again SparkFunESP8266WiFi.h has a direct reference to this header file.

Is there another workaround, or is the Wifi Shield not compatible with the Turbo? Thank you in advance for any help!

2

This seems to be a part of a larger problem beyond SparkFun, in the Arduino repository for the SAMD21: https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-samd/issues/234. There seems to be some work-arounds suggested in that ticket but they require modification to software files that we can’t directly support.

I would recommend posting a GitHub issue (https://github.com/sparkfun/SparkFun_ES … ary/issues) and we will try to look into the issue when possible. Thank you for calling that to our attention.

3

Thank you Brandon! I will dig deeper into the GitHub and Arduino forums.