From a box of parts
to a sensing room.

The easy way: let Claude Code do the fiddly parts

This guide assumes you're working in VS Code with Claude Code. The simplest path: open your project, add RuView as a git submodule (next section), install the RuView plugin, and then mostly just tell Claude Code in plain English what you want — it flashes the nodes, sets their WiFi, and helps wire up the dashboard for you. (Having Ruflo installed adds extra orchestration, but it's not required.)

The exact commands below are "under the hood" — handy if you want to understand them or do it by hand, but you usually won't need to type them yourself.

LD6004 radar — wire it to GPIO, and never brown-out ✓

No flashing either — the LD6004 talks plain serial. But how you power it decides whether it stays alive. Field lesson from our own rig: LD2450s on a USB hub froze repeatedly (USB-serial adapters die under hub power variance; only re-seating directly into the Pi fixed them). The LD6004 avoids that class of failure entirely by skipping USB: four jumper wires straight to the Pi's GPIO header, powered by the Pi's own 3.3 V rail. Result on our rig: zero brown-outs in 7+ weeks of continuous duty (the module draws an estimated <50 mA against the rail's ~300 mA budget).

It appears as /dev/serial0 at 115200 baud (8N1, fixed — there's no command to change it). The "rich" firmware variant streams X/Y/Z floats in meters at ~10 Hz; when the room is empty you still get heartbeat packets, which is your "sensor alive" signal. Wire colors are convention, not guarantee — trust the pin labels on the module, not the wire colors.

Rules of thumb for any radar: GPIO UART beats USB; if a sensor must be USB (LD2450), plug it directly into the Pi or use a powered hub; and your AX210/BE200 card never competes for this power — it lives on the Pi 5's PCIe HAT, a separate rail. (Honest gaps: the LD6004's exact current draw and in-field Z-axis noise floor aren't formally specified — our numbers are observed-in-deployment, not datasheet.)

Hate the flimsy little wires? You're right to. Friction-fit Dupont jumpers work, but they wiggle loose and feel like they'll snap — we've broken them. Three sturdier upgrades, easiest first: (1) a screw-terminal GPIO breakout HAT (~$12–18, search "Raspberry Pi GPIO screw terminal HAT") — every wire clamps under a screw, nothing can wiggle out, labels printed next to each terminal; the single best upgrade for less-technical builders. (2) JST-XH pre-crimped locking harnesses (~$8 a kit) — connectors that click and can't pull free; needs matching headers on the radar side. (3) Strain relief regardless: a dab of hot glue over the seated connector plus a zip-tie anchoring the cable an inch away turns even Dupont wires into something that survives handling. (We've field-tested the bare-Dupont path; the screw-terminal HAT recommendation is standard practice, not yet our own rig.)

Powering the sensors that hang off the Pi: everything attached to the Pi — the GPIO radar, a USB LD2450, anything on the header — draws from the Pi's own power supply, so the PSU is the foundation: use the official 27 W USB-C supply for a Pi 5 (with a weaker one, the Pi caps its USB ports at 600 mA total and peripherals brown out; with the 27 W it allows 1.6 A). Sensors not attached to the Pi power themselves: ESP32 nodes from wall adapters or always-on batteries (see the battery section), the MR60 from any USB-C source.

Already own an LD2450? It still works — but it's not the pick

The LD2450 USB kit needs no flashing either: plug its USB adapter into the Seed and read serial at 256000 baud (the unusual rate — not 115200). For movement it's been superseded by the LD6004 (true 3D, GPIO power, no USB-hub flakiness). Reach for an LD2450 only if you can't touch GPIO pins at all, or you specifically need 3 people tracked at once (2D). If you're buying new, buy the LD6004.

MR60BHA2 vitals — ships ready, configure over WiFi

It comes pre-loaded with ESPHome firmware, so you don't flash it — it just needs your WiFi credentials. The simplest way: ask Claude Code to provision its WiFi (ESPHome is what's running under the hood). Then the Seed connects out to it and pulls heart rate & breathing over TCP 6053.

The trap: the XIAO has two USB-C ports. The one on the case edge is power only. To configure it, open the case and use the XIAO's own inner USB-C port. ESPHome docs ↗

ESP32 CSI nodes — these get flashed (once)

Easiest: with the RuView plugin loaded in Claude Code, just plug a node into your Mac/PC and ask. Type something like:

"Flash this ESP32-S3 as CSI node #1, join WiFi 'MyNetwork' / 'mypassword',
and stream to my Seed at 10.0.0.50 on UDP 5005."

Claude Code (driving RuView) handles the toolchain, the config and the flash. Repeat for each node, bumping the number to 2, 3 … 7. Prefer to do it by hand? Here's exactly what's happening under the hood (Espressif's free ESP-IDF / esptool):

# RuView's CSI firmware builds for the C6 and S3 (there is NO C5 target)
cd RuView/firmware/esp32-csi-node
idf.py set-target esp32c6        # or: esp32s3 — release notes say IDF 5.5.2+ for full C6 HE-LTF CSI
idf.py build
idf.py -p /dev/cu.usbmodemXXXX flash monitor
# then provision WiFi + node ID + Seed IP (no reflash needed):
python provision.py --port /dev/cu.usbmodemXXXX \
  --ssid "YourWiFi" --password "secret" --target-ip 192.168.1.20 --node-id 1

tcpdump -ni any udp port 5005   # expect ~10 packets/sec from the node

M5StickS3 (motion) — same idea, it's an ESP32-S3

If you added the M5StickS3, it's an ESP32-S3 board, so you flash it the same way (ESP-IDF / esptool) — or use M5's own no-code tool, UIFlow. Set your WiFi + the Seed's address, and it streams its IMU (motion/vibration) to the Seed over WiFi. It's the in-stock successor to the discontinued M5StickC PLUS2.