Arduino outputting gibberish on serial

Other Hardware 3rd Party Boards
1

I built a standalone arduino based circuit on perfboard for my project and I have brought out 5 pins : RX, TX, RST, 5V, GND
Then I built a cable using female and male headers to connect my circuit to the arduino.
I popped out the atmega chip from my uno and place it in the socket on my board, then connect the uno and my board using the cable.

First thing I did was try uploading a sketch (ASCIITable example), it failed.. :frowning:
Checked all connections and everything appears to be fine. So I placed the chip back into the uno and tried upload. Upload succeded. Opened serial monitor and its running the sketch fine. Placed the chip back into my board and now when I open serial monitor, I get a long line of non-ascii random characters.
I have nothing connected to pin 0 and pin 1 due to issues with serial communication and low impedance load.

I think my problem is with the crystal. It has the same footprint as the crystal on the uno but its about 3 times as high.
It has 16.630 KDSI written on it. I'm using it with 18pf caps.

2

You have identified the problem. You want 16.000

3

I couldn't find a 16.000 at the local store so picked up a 16.630 instead thinking it was close enough, apparently not.
I have a dead arduino lying around so I think I'll salvage the 16.000 from that.

Oh well. Thanks for the confirmation.