• I already had this kind of garbage when using a serial port. In my case, the device (which was not an Espruino nor an ESP8266) had a very bad clock reference, and the baudrate was not totally aligned with one of the 'standards' baudrates. Just to be sure, could you try to connect with putty with , by example, a baudrate like 115000, 114000, 115500, 116000 ?

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