I normally SSH to my Home Assistant Yellow by connecting a USB-C cable from my Desktop to the Yellow. I installed the USB to UART Bridge VCP Drivers - Silicon Labs. Then I use Putty to SSH to establish a serial connection to the COM port. It just worked last night. Now when I try to connect I get the gibberish shown in the screenshot. I tried rebooting the yellow and also my desktop PC. Re-connected the USB cable several times. The USB to UART bridge port appears, but is not working correctly.
Can anyone tell me what else I could do to fix this issue?
I got it working again by connecting to the terminal window using Putty, then rebooting the HA Yellow. As I watched the terminal window line after line of garbage was displayed. Then at some point it began displaying normal text. Tried connecting several more times and it seems OK now.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but your jumbling of terminology in this post shows your potentially dangerous lack of understanding of what you are actually doing. You are making a “console” connection to the device, via a serial port. This is a legacy artifact of computers nearly 70 years old. The OS sets up this connection as a basic way to access the OS, usually reserved for last ditch efforts in this day and age.
You aren’t using SSH. You are making a serial console connection. Your screenshot clearly shows “SSH” not selected and “Serial” selected. Putty is simply translating to a serial connection in this case. The serial protocol is unrelated to SSH, for example it is not encrypted. For a simple cable connection from one computer to another that’s probably not an issue, but you should be aware of the distinction.
The “Gibberish” you posted is typically caused by a mismatch in serial speed or framing parameters. These are typically data bits, parity, and stop bits. You can Google these for details.
You’re right it’s not an SSH connection. I read the instructions, this worked for months, nothing was changed in my settings, it just started spewing out garbage characters. As I stated I got it working by establishing a terminal connection (replete with garbage characters), while at the same time rebooting my Home Assistant Yellow. After viewing garbage characters for a short time, normal characters began being displayed after which it worked normally again. With the same settings.
As I said rebooting the HA Yellow and PC did not help.
