(Pico) USB serial connection having noise?

Question

I'm having some trouble trying to make a simple USB IO demo to test the Pico. Apparently, the USB serial connection seems to be noisy, and always puts something into the UART buffer even though I am not sending anything from my end.
In the following code, I simply try to read something with getchar_timeout, which should return PICO_ERROR_TIMEOUT if nothing was sent through serial, but it's instead just printing random characters (even ilegible ones). What could be the cause of this?

int main() {
    stdio_init_all();
    char PC_input;
    
    while (1) {
        sleep_ms(1000);
        PC_input = getchar_timeout_us(1000);

        if (PC_input == PICO_ERROR_TIMEOUT) {
            printf("Timeour error!\n");
        } else {
            printf("input was %c\n", PC_input);
        }
    }

    return 0;
}

The output I get looks like this (I only typed in 'asd123'):
input was �
input was �
input was a
input was s
input was d
input was 1
input was 2
input was 3
input was �
input was �
input was �
input was �

Answer 1

Make sure the baud rate in your serial terminal is set to 115200. Also, try a different cable, and if that fails, try a different computer.

Answer 2

Fixed! The problem was that I was storing the return of the getchar_timeout_us function as a char instead of int.