Bar Code Scanner

Can you describe how everything is connected? (sanity checking)

I would agree that that should work, based on the datasheet, but that gibberish totally looks like wrong-bandwidth gibberish. But you can't really tell as much as one would like to with console.log, because the non-printing characters don't get escaped, so you can't actually see what all the characters are.

Try doing:

dat="";
Serial2.on('data', function(data) {
  dat+=data;
});

Then scan something

Then do:

console.log(dat);

dat;

datcharvals=E.toUint8Array(dat);

Each of those should print something, post the results - From that, you can sometimes figure out what's wrong with the UART settings (especially when you know exactly what the output is, as you do)