'ascii' codec can't decode byte

[AtharvaBhorpe]

I'm using ROS-Melodic. When running the serial_odom.py script in ROS, it's giving the following output:

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vm: $rosrun serial_odom serial_odom.py _port:=/dev/ttyACM0 [INFO] [1615798346.197255]: Serial odometry starting [INFO] [1615798346.204596]: Publishing odometry: odom [INFO] [1615798346.207512]: Publishing transform from odom to base_link [INFO] [1615798346.209393]: Starting on serial port: /dev/ttyACM0 [INFO] [1615798347.170208]: Reaching for serial [INFO] [1615798347.171422]: Here are the first 5 data readings ... Exception in thread Thread-8: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/threading.py", line 801, in __bootstrap_inner self.run() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/threading.py", line 754, in run self.__target(*self.__args, **self.__kwargs) File "/home/vm/URDFs/src/Simple-ROS-Arduino-odometry/script/v0.3/serial_odom.py", line 95, in serial_handle rospy.loginfo( init_msg.encode('ascii')[0:(len(init_msg)-1)] ) UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xbf in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)

^CShutting down

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What am I doing wrong here? Thanks in advance.