Unable to read all information from Nios II UART

Julia,

What we mean by 'printable' is characters that have a vaule in the range 0x20 to 0x7f, these values are represented by characters like 'A' to 'Z', 'a' to 'z', '0' to '9' and all the other punctuation symbols. The other 'unprintable' characters are usually reserved for controlling data flow (XON/XOFF), data verification (ACK/NACK) and other stuff. Do a search for "ASCII table" and you'll find something that explains it better than I could.

Although some characters are 'unprintable' Hyperterminal intercepts them and attaches symbols to them. For example, 0x01 becomes the white smiley face and 0x04 becomes the diamond (both seen in your screenshot).

To get back to the point, if your dev kit is transmitting 'printable' data such as "Hello World, this is a test of the UART.\n" and Hyperterminal is typically displaying the garbage shown in your screenshot then I would say that the dev kit and the PC are working with differently configured serial ports.

You need to find out how the UART on your dev kit is configured (excalibur.h or system.h) and edit the hyperterminal settings to suit. The fact that you are getting garbage at least means the hardware appears to be connected correctly.

Good luck.

Banx.