Garbage character when opening the serial port /dev/ttyAMA0

[Kalin Nakov]

If you see a garbage rectangle (or other garbage characters) when opening minicom or using the SDK to send a command to the Pi, this topic is for you. The garbage character is caused by a software bug in the Raspberry Pi's serial port driver. You can read more about it here: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2014-February/236904.html. Since it causes garbage characters to appear in the console, we're going to to filter them out. The Vehicle Pi works in the ASCII charset anyways. As a work around on your side, please send an empty line as the first command when opening the serial port. The empty line will scoop out the garbage. The SDK demo file will also be updated accordingly. Another solution would certainly be patching the bug in the serial driver of Raspbian if you plan to use custom build of the Raspbian kernel for faster boot time.