Arduino Serial Monitor shows strange ASCII characters

Question

I connected an ArduiMU v3+ via a FTDI-cable to my Mac (OS X 10.10) (latest VC FTDI driver is installed and loaded).

Inside the Arduino-software the Serial Monitor (monitoring /dev/cu.usbserial-AJ038NZ3) shows a lot of weird ASCII characters. What could be the reason for this problem?

Answer 1

Instead of using the Arduino Serial Monitor, use OS X's ability to determine the baud rate automatically. Whenever, I use my FTDI cable, I monitor the input using the screen command.

In this case you can grep for the name of the device:

ls /dev | grep tty\.[Uu]sb | awk '{print "/dev/"$1}' | xargs screen

check out man screen for a bit more background.

or use the simple version by finding the name of the port in the /dev folder then using

screen <name_of_FTDI>