I'm trying to use an ESP8266 (Wemos D1 mini) to read from a 19.2K serial port and report the results over WiFi. Programming is via Arduino IDE. The code to read the port works just fine if WiFi is not enabled. Once WiFi is enabled I lose chars from the input stream. I've seen several posts in various places that point to problems with using SoftwareSerial and WiFi at the same time, apparently having to do with timing conflicts. My latest attempt calls
WiFi.disconnect();
before the code that reads the chars from the serial stream, then calls
WiFi.reconnect();
after reading the serial stream but before making the calls to send data over the web. This did not work.
My code is reading from the serial port in a (blocking) loop, which other posts suggest is the problem. This is not a problem when there is no WiFi object connection. I could restructure the code to create a non-blocking read, but that would be a significant effort (and make the code much harder to understand), so before I go that route I'm wondering if there is a different solution.