mmWave radar sensors are becoming incredibly accessible. Modules like the one we look at in the guide (Rd-03D) have a mind-blowing amount of signal processing going on under the hood. This can do things like detect a 0.3 Picosecond difference in signal return to determine the angle of a target and use the micro-doppler shifts of your breathing to only detect humans (and maybe animals but we didn’t test it). It’s a wickedly cool and inexpensive sensor to add to your project or just play around with so check it out: “Detect and Track Humans with mmWave Radar on an Arduino”
In this guide, we are going to be learning how to use the Rd-03D radar sensor to detect and track humans in your next Arduino project. We will be looking at how it works and what you can expect from it, how to wire up and code your Arduino to interf…
Great Guide! Thankyou so much for doing all of the heavy lifting on this one .
I was just wondering if there would eventually be a guide using Micropython on the Raspbery Pi Pico with its’ dedicated 2nd UART interface??
We are working on it right now and if all goes to plan it will be out Wednesday. It will hopefully have a few more bells and whistles with multi-target tracking!
looking good! the video after yours was show casing how effective it is with at least 3 people also and runing it in home assistant. I suck at any sort of code “learning as i go” however, have you guys made any code for ESPhome at all? Ive currently used the LD2410c and honestly from my testing they are not the best, and very particular use case, this Rd-03D seems more promising =)
We haven’t tested this sensor with ESPHome as of yet, currently the specific chipset that runs this sensor isn’t supported natively by ESPHome yet, but being that its a UART based sensor it does make it a little easier to get working.
Using an LLM like ChatGPT is a great way to get an idea of the code that would be needed to get things like this working.
To add on to Dan’s response, the library decodes a bytes object rather than a somewhat-human-readable like NMEA from GPS.
I’ve got this planned for a project at home, but a second microcontroller would run the sensor interface, and output the required information in though UART like Dan said.
I haven’t delved too deep into the workings of this configuration but it should be possible (and a lot easier) with a second micro: UART Bus — ESPHome
When getting them onto the website they were the best-in-class sensor so should be a step up!
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