I’ve just retried it, but I am not able to re-produce it, so I suspect I pressed the wrong character myself 
Anyway the error regarding malformed escape character persists. Whenever I change it to the correct password that contains a special char !!!
I will now change the password on opensprinkler itself so that it does not contain special charachters anymore and run another test.
Edit:
Seems to look better. The bridge comes online now.