Most existing applications which communicate with smartcard readers make use of the PCSC protocol. This means that in order to make use of the Hyper Card Rack, these applications require some minor modifications. In order to remove this hurdle, Lisle Design have developed a proprietary driver which takes the place of pcsclite on a Linux system and enable the Hyper Rack to be integrated as Plug & Play to your existing application. For more information on PCSC and USB limitations, see our help page. Most of this help file has been written with raspberryPi in mind, but the driver has been developed for both amd64 and armhf (RaspberryPi)

Note that installing the Hyper Driver will prevent normal PCSC USB readers from working. The driver also only supports one USB hyper rack connection at this time.

Step One - Prerequisites when using RaspberryPi

1. Minmimum: Raspberry PI 2 Model B with 4gb SD Card
2. Fresh Raspbian install of Bullseye operating system.
3. PI user and password should be changed for security
4. With the Raspberry PI turned off, plug a card rack into a usb on the Raspberry PI. Extra modules should be attached using previous/next RS232 connectors
5. Ensure the Raspberry PI is internet capable
6. The Raspberry PI should be SSH enabled for maintenance. This will allow Lisle support to download logs in case of any issues. How to enable SSH on Raspberry PI without a screen

Step Two - Digidown apt repository

1. With Card rack plugged in, turn on Linux system and open a terminal via SSH
2. Enter the following commands to add the Digidown apt repository to your trusted sources and install the driver. Make sure to change 'armhf' to 'amd64' in the third line if using amd64.
   • wget -O - https://apt.digidown.net/keys/digidown.asc | gpg --dearmor > digidown.asc.gpg
   • sudo mv digidown.asc.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/
   • wget https://apt.digidown.net/config/armhf/digidown.list
   • sudo mv digidown.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/digidown.list
   • sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/digidown.asc.gpg
   • sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/sources.list.d/digidown.list
   • sudo apt-get update
   • sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
   • sudo apt-get install digidown-hyperdriver

Step Three - Testing

To test the driver has been installed correctly, insert a card into the rack and run the pcsc_scan utility as sudo

sudo pcsc_scan

If the driver has been successfully installed, you should see the detection of the readers and the card details:

PC/SC device scanner
V 1.5.2 (c) 2001-2017, Ludovic Rousseau
Plug'n play reader name not supported. Using polling every 1000 ms.
Scanning present readers...
0: Reader 1
1: Reader 2
2: Reader 3
3: Reader 4
4: Reader 5
5: Reader 6
6: Reader 7
7: Reader 8
8: Reader 9
9: Reader 10
10: Reader 11
11: Reader 12
12: Reader 13
13: Reader 14
14: Reader 15
15: Reader 16
16: Reader 17
17: Reader 18
18: Reader 19
19: Reader 20
20: Reader 21
21: Reader 22
22: Reader 23


Version 1.0.2 released on 25th November 2022