ESP32-CAM prints gibberish to Serial Monitor on startup

Using Arduino Microcontrollers
1

The startup text my device emits is gibberish. Please help.

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2

I'm using an esp32s CAM with micro usd

3

Hi @ejas. It is normal to see some gibberish in Serial Monitor when the ESP32-based board starts running the sketch program. The reason is that this microcontroller has a built-in program called a "bootloader", which runs for a short time when the microcontroller starts. The bootloader prints some debugging information to serial at 115200 baud. If you have a baud rate other than 115200 selected from the menu at the top right corner of the Serial Monitor panel, the output from the bootloader will appear as some gibberish characters.

The bootloader output is only useful in the case where you need to troubleshoot an unexpected reset of your sketch program during runtime. In other cases, the information from the bootloader is not useful, so it being printed as gibberish characters is not a real problem. In this case, you should make sure the Serial Monitor baud rate menu is configured appropriately for the baud rate used by your sketch program and simply ignore those initial gibberish characters.

You will find it helpful to add a couple of blank lines of output at the start of your sketch program to visually separate the sketch output from the bootloader output. You can do this by adding the following lines of code immediately after the Serial.begin call in your sketch:

Serial.println();
Serial.println();