Just received the Carambola2 development board yesterday and tried to power up. I hooked up the board's mini-usb port to a PC which supports FTDI usb-to-serial, and start a terminal program (FoxTerm) with 115200/8/n/1/no-handshake. The terminal program connected to the USB-to-serial port successfully, but I didn't see any console message dumped to the terminal. Any hint to look for and debug further?

The usb port where the FTDI chip interface with is always 5v. The 2.5v/3.3v cmos signals are between the onboard FTDI chip and AR9331 - i.e. the UART interface, and that should be taken care by the development board design.

Is that a correct assumption that when the Carambola2 development board is plugged in to a PC with a proper FTDI driver and correct serial port settings, I should see console message dump to the terminal software? If not, then it is a mal-function board.

I had a similar problem. Usually when I started up the carabola 2 dev board I got nothing on the terminal. Not sure why...

I found that if I hold down the reset button (S2), get it plugged in, terminal up, etc, then release the power button it works every time.