The Standard Card Rack 20 supports all class B and class AB smart cards, including all tachograph smart cards. The Standard Card Rack 20 can be used with flat-fronted smart card such as those used with digital tachographs. They can also be used with embossed cards such as those for banking.

The number of cards you can support will depend on the USB limitations of your system. Please see the question below for details of some common operating systems.

There is a maximum number of smart cards that can be connected to a single computer via direct USB. This is determined by the operating system and hardware of the computer.

• Windows 8 and 10 impose a limit of 10 smart card readers. For example, if you connect your Standard Card Rack 20 to your Windows 10 computer, you will only see 10 card readers when you would expect to see 20.
• Windows 7 and Windows Server impose a limit of 32 card readers.
• Recent versions of Windows and Windows remote desktop connect to card readers in a way that makes it difficult to use them for other applications.
• VM Ware imposes a limit of 20 USB devices (including smart card readers and all other USB devices) per instance.
• Linux does not impose any strict limits on the number of card readers connected, however some files may need to be changed to achieve this. The limits are then determined by the USB hardware of the computer. USB is a 'busy' protocol and requires significant processing power. A theoretical limit of 127 devices per USB host exists, however in practice this is actually around 65.

Please see the USB Limitation information page for more details.

If you require more card readers than your computer will allow, the Lisle Design Hyper Card Rack™ is designed to allow up to 6000 card readers to be connected to one computer.

The Standard Card Rack 20 is designed to work with all Windows and Linux systems. The drivers should be pre-installed in most operating systems, however if you have a problem, please contact us.

Yes.

Lisle Design has two different card reader systems: Standard and Hyper.

The standard card readers are ideal for those who only need to host a small number of smart cards and are not concerned about the USB limitations of their system. The standard card readers are plug-and-play - they do not require any additional software. You will immediately be able to communicate with the smart cards.

The Hyper Card Rack™ is designed to allow the connection of hundreds of card readers to one host computer. Using serial data multiplexing, 240 card readers can be connected to just one USB connection. There is a very small amount of additional software required to communicate with the Hyper Card Rack™. A development kit is available to assist with this.

All of our card reader units are available with an optional integrated Raspberry Pi mini server. We do not supply an operating system with these units.

Please see our card reader comparison chart or contact us for more details.

Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation

Some operating systems crash when initialise too many USB card readers at once. By adding a delay at startup chances of this happening are significantly reduced.