Bug workarounds?

I have just finished my first ever patch and got it working hunkydorily well, saved it and then tried to re-open it again only to be greeted with a blank grey square. I was perturbed to say the least. After much digging, I discovered a possible cause for this which is that in order for my patch to work I am sending some rather odd ASCII characters through the serial port, and these odd characters are being interpreted by vvvv as UTF-8 encoding and it will therefore not load the patch. I realise this is a known bug but I cannot change the characters I am sending as they need to correspond to specific binary codes in an externally connected device.
Does anyone have any idea of a way out of this mess? PLEASE!!
(offending patch is attached)

robotone.v4p (8.8 kB)

offending patch is attached

i can’t see it.

Sorry, it didn’t attach properly - should now be visible!

Do not save the strings you like to send in an IOBox, use SpellValue(String) instead to generate them during runtime.

I haven’t looked at your patch, but couldn’t you save the commands into a text file and then load them in, saves them being present in the patch itself?

open up your patch with any editor. (i prefer XMLmarker)
search
NODE id=“6”

it has the evil characters inside.

PIN pinname=“Input String” slicecount=“5” values="||,||,||,||,||"

just delete them and save.

PIN pinname=“Input String” slicecount=“5” values=""

now you should be able to start your patch again.
then go with bjoern’s advice, should work like candy.

it is a well known bug/phenomenon/feature that those characters in “open” input pins cause trouble on startup.