A pain. Oh a pain.

The Rd03D on paper is a fantastic sensor. The expectations of multiperson tracking and perfect detection seems too good to be true.

The struggle starts with sourcing the board itself. The issue with emerging tech is the avaiability of sensors that are not ready to hit the market.

More than that even once I did get my hands on a board. The issue was finding the right cable to fit the JST in, what that resorted to was soldering straight to the surface mount pins.

As a novice in soldering, this is not something i was prepared for. The techinique and right temperature play such a crucial role in getting it right.

And thats where the first blunder happened. In the process, i got three connected perfectly, but the 4th one and the most important on the ground pin. I worked my way straight through the pad, leaving there noting left for me to solder onto.

The hunt for the right JST continued, In hopes that the board was not fried.

Amazon was not the best, as the “Connector for the board” was at a price point almost 10X the price of a generic JST. Why? Just cause it was SEO’d well “Connector for RD03D”.

This led me down the road of hunting through documentation of the board. Many links later and failed alibaba searches, the answer was found buried in a documentation file. 1.25mm Micro JST connectors, a pack of 30 for the same of one of the so called “Connector for the Rd03D” a standardized cable.

An attempt was made pre getting the JST cable though, jump wires between levels to make sure the board wasn’t dead. But to no avail. But well thats cause as all electronics projects go, there were too many variables going wrong.

With the right cable the goal was to now attempt to figure out if the sensor actually works (one less problem to worry about)

After wiring everything up and running the code. The serial port still showed no signs of detection.

The answer to why you ask? Cause i was connecting the RX to the RX and TX to the TX. Swapping those too would solve it you’d say. Well it did. But later. Cause we had another problem the serial on the board i was using was the serial connected to the chip. So no data could be hooked up to it.