RPICT Stacking

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RPICT7V1 RPICT4V3 and RPICT8 can be stacked together to expand sensor capacity.

This page is only for versions 2 & 3. For versions 5 please refer to this page here.

5 boards can be stacked together to offer up to 35 SCT sensors capacity on one Raspberrypi.

In the stacked configuration only one board has a Microcontroller which is the Master board. For the slave board the microcontroller should be removed.

Stacking offers the ability to compute Current/Voltage pairs between different board type. For example one might stack 1 RPICT7V1 with 1 RPICT8 and compute Active Power against V1 on RPICT7V1 and all other 15 CT channels on both RPICT7V1 and RPICT8.

What can be stacked together?

All unit in the same group can be stacked together.

Group 1 -

  • RPICT7V1 Version 2.x
  • RPICT4V3 Version 2.x
  • RPICT8 Version 1.x
  • RPI_T8 Version 2.x

Group 2

  • RPICT7V1 Version 3.x
  • RPICT4V3 Version 3.x
  • RPICT8 Version 3.x

Software Limitations

The default sketch limits the number of CV pairs to 28. This allows at least 3 units to be stacked together.

If higher stack are required use the noOSC sketch instead to increase the number of CV pairs to compute.

Hardware Configuration for slave

2 Steps to configure a single board or master board as slave:
1 - Remove the 28 pin microcontroller.
2 - Setup the jumper as shown below.

Always place the Master board at the bottom of the stack. The order of other boards above the master can be any.

Software Configuration

The RPICT boards do not configure automatically after being stacked. The user must configure this using the tools provided.

The master board can be configured over serial.

The documentation for serial configuration can be found on this page.

Over Serial Configuration - Sketch 2.6 & 2.7.1
Over Serial Configuration - Sketch 2.8

Over Serial Configuration - Sketch 3.0

Starting from sketch 2.4 the board can be configured with the online configurator.

Jumpers

There are four jumpers to configure the board as Master or Slave. The 5 possible configurations are:

Jumpers Configuration
Type Master Slave 1 Slave 2 Slave 3 Slave 4
CS Pin 10 6 7 8 9
Jumpers