A customer had issues installing node-red-node-serialport at the latest version (2.0.2 at the time of writing) with groov EPIC firmware 3.5, and unfortunately the NPM packages and their prerequisites are out of Opto control, so I dug into it and found a workaround.
To get it installed, go to the manage “install nodes” interface from groov Manage Home → Node-RED → Advanced: Node Management, it looks like this…
Once you’re there put in the module name node-red-node-serialport and put in just 0 for the version number, since 0.×.× is the lowest version available for this package. For me this installed the module at version 0.15.0 without any errors.
This trick may work for other node packages you’re having trouble installing, so feel free to play around with it! Just be sure to start with the lowest available release, if there is no version 0, but there is a v1, then start with 1.