Hey peekay123,
Yes, that is the correct location of the pins, here is the pinout:
And you are correct that I am bypassing the shifter on the board when I am using it to send data to putty. Because the wire is open ended, I wanted to just use the female RS232 end of the board as a means to create a direct connection from the sensor to my computer, just to ensure that the senor is streaming data correctly and to see what format it is coming out as. Essentially for that test I was just creating a female rs232 end to my wire.
So thinking about it now, if this set up (for bypassing the shifter) works then data is streaming into pin 2 on the female end as outgoing data and being received on pin 2 on the male end (as it is supposed to, right?). But then if I need data to be streaming into my female pin 3 for the shifter to work, I would have to cross the wires as @ScruffR suggested. My bad ScruffR, took me a while to get my head wrapped around this one.
But this still doesn’t give me the correct (or any) results. I will try checking voltages today and getting some cleaner solders going. Let me know if you all have any more suggestions!
Thanks