time-limited licence problem

if you do not receive a character, check if your uart is setup as hardware flow control. if that is the case and your rts cts are not correctly setup then the uart will not transmit a character, but you would see that in debuging mode.

signal tap is tool you can add inside quartus.

you need to add inside signal tap the stuff you want to monitor and then need to recompile your design. once signal tap is added you can monitor these signals with quartus.

recheck your pin definition maybe you have reversed txd rxd direction, a common mistake. i highly recommend to have a look at the hardware pins to see if the change their levels when you try to send out a character.

altera has some guides on their web site