Arduino Clone - Severino Issues

[AJK101]

Hi,

I saw arduino severino a while back and thought it'd be cool to try and recreate a similar thing for some small projects.
I got the schematic and altered it, as I didn't want to program using DB9 (I don't have a good DB9/RS232 to USB converter). And i had used another USB-TTL converter (CP2102 from Silicon Labs) earlier, and so I thought I could use it instead of the general FTDI.
So, i made a board and got a cheap PCB made for it. And something really weird happened :
I burnt the bootloader, and was able to program the arduino with Blink and other codes.
While testing, I tested Serial Comm, and it did not work. i.e. I was getting gibberish on SerialMonitor. The same character keeps appearing ... so, if I tell it to print("a"), it doesnt, but always prints "p" (with 2 dots on top ... ) So, basically, it seems like some bits got corrupt.
(Baudrates and all were fine.)
I have no clue why this happened.

... I could program it, so Serial should work fine, but it doesn't.



Anyone faced such an issue ? Please help me out here, it's driving me crazy ...

[westfw]

I can't think of a reason that serial communications would be broken if upload sketches is working.
What bitrate are you using for your sketch?  Are you sure the Serial.begin() and the Serial monitor bitrate are set the same?  This is exactly the sort of behavior you'd expect to see with the wrong bitrate set.

What are you using for AVR clock, which bootloader, and what for board type?  I can imagine a circumstance where bootloading works because both clock and upload speed are set equally wrong in the same direction, but sketches fail because the clockrate of the chip doesn't match the clockrate in boards.txt...