Use the Bolt device with a SAMD21 board

ksprayberry · January 10, 2019, 2:41pm

So I have an industriuno Proto and IND/IO Industruino board with a ATSAMD21G18 MCU board. It doesn’t not like the softwareserial reference in the Bolt helper .h file I guess because all the . Is there some way a version of the Bolt helper file could be revised or ported over to be compatible with this processor? I’d do it, but I’m not that smart, i’m just a mechanical engineer. I did find this that appears to be a porting of such of the Softwareserial, can I use this and point to these files in the directory somehow?
https://github.com/arduino-org/Arduino/blob/1364019868e2ad044c87dd0f143052a92eebda98/hardware/arduino/samd/libraries/SoftwareSerial/SoftwareSerial.cpp

keltra · January 11, 2019, 1:27am

So I posed the same question in the Industruino forum and their support person has this response to the workaround. I add this as I understand this is the same board/processor as the Arduino Zero MkR board. Maybe this will be off help to someone.

“Now indeed the SoftwareSerial library is not available for D21G (same MCU as Arduino M0) because the idea is that there are enough hardware serials. But your library requires the softwareserial library to be present. It’s fairly easy to bypass that requirement:

in helper.h comment out line 14 (the include)
in helper.cpp comment out lines 25,26,27 (the only references to softwareserial)

When i do that, the example sketch compiles.”

vinayak.joshi · January 11, 2019, 5:22am

Hi @keltra,
Thank you for taking an interest and posting this solution. We will look into updating the library such that people do not need to do this hack.

keltra · January 11, 2019, 11:02am

That would be great! I guess if I modify these files, I’ll have to change them back when I do something with a mega or an Uno to compile them if I need to use software serial.
Thanks!
Kelly

vinayak.joshi · January 11, 2019, 11:25am

Hi @keltra

You do not need to change them in any way to make the code compile. But you will have to change them back if you want to use softwareserial.

vinayak.joshi · January 15, 2019, 7:06am

Hi @ksprayberry,

Was this project by you?

Amazing work.

keltra · January 15, 2019, 11:10am

Yes! That was me. I’ve been working on this project for about a year. Originally, I had it setup with an Arduino Mega and a ESP8266 WiFi board. It took me a day or so of reading and reflashing the 8266 to get it working right and then a little finagling to get it to talk to Thingspeak. The BoltIOT cut that back to about 15-30 minutes to have it flying and reporting data to the Bolt cloud. Very helpful.
Thanks
Kelly