UART wierdness

I can't see the images you posted; there's is some error with the attachments.

Anyway, usually when you receive weird characters on a uart serial port, you have a problem with the baudrate. i.e.: xmitter and receiver are not set at the same baudrate and char codes are interpreted in a wrong way.

Possibile causes of problem:

- code: you did set a wrong baudrate on xmitter or receiver

- hw: clock problem; the nominal baudrate is correct but the actual one is not, so you get data rate mismatch on the serial line; you can simply check with an oscilloscope

- code or hw: a problem in character decoding; debug the uart interface and the sw driver

- phy: noise on the serial line link

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As far as hardware, my only theory is that maybe it is expecting some data from the other pins that aren't being used on the serial port. Like I said, I'm only using Rx, Tx, and GND, and there are 6 others that aren't necessary (my computer is communicating fine without them) but the DE2 might want.

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The other pins are ininfluent; they are only used for flow control. If you can actually send and receive data (although weird it is), then the problem is not with these pins.

Regards

Cris