title: pySerial and reading binary data
body: <p>When the device I am communicating with sends binary data, I can recover most of it. However, there always seem to be some bytes missing, replaced by non-standard characters. For instance, one individual output looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>\xc4\xa5\x06\x00.\xb3\x01\x01\x02\x00\x00\x00=\xa9
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The period and equals sign should be traditional bytes in hexadecimal format (I confirmed this in another application). Other times I get other weird characters such as ')' or 's'. These characters usually occur in the exact same spot (which varies with the command I passed to the device).</p>
  
  <p>How can I fix this problem?</p>