No tag detection in certain time frames on ESP8266 (SoftwareSerial) #5
Description
I was trying to use the RDM6300 with the ESP8266, and was facing a weird issue: sometimes the ESP wasn't detecting that a tag was being read. Upon adding some debug code, I noticed the available() method from SoftwareSerial was returning false, even when there was data being sent constantly to the input pin.
Upon further tests, I found out this problem always happened at a certain time after the last successful SoftwareSerial reading. Then I was able to isolate the problem, make it reproducible, and reported it on plerup/espsoftwareserial#100.
In short, the SoftwareSerial doesn't indicates there's data available between 27 and 53 seconds after the last data received. Not only that, but it seems periodic, i.e. there's a time frame it received data, and then there's a time frame it doesn't receive. That means the reading routines becomes unresponsive in those time frames, like there was no tag being read (even when it does).
It would be great if someone could also try to replicate the problem and report it there on plerup/espsoftwareserial#100.