Skip to main content
Board Stacking 101

Board Stacking – 101

Board stacking is simply the process of taking 2 or more prototyping boards and fixing them into a vertical stack. The main reason for doing this is to build systems that are bigger than just 1 board.

Board Stacking
Board Stacking

All the Protostack Large, Medium and Small boards have a common form factor. This is what makes stacking possible. The full size boards have 6 mounting holes whilst the half size boards have 4. The diagrams below shows these holes and dimensions.


Small, medium and large  prototyping boards

When you create a stack, you use a combination of m3 screws, m3 Male/female spacers and m3 female/female spacers to fix the boards into place. The diagram below shows the arrangement of these components.

Board Stacking
Stacking Headers

In most cases, you will want to share power and data between the boards in the stack. There are many ways of doing this. One way is to use stacking headers. These are similar to standard 0.1″ (2.54mm) female headers but with longer pins. These stacking headers were carefully selected to fit 10-12mm spacers and are ideal for running data and power between boards in a stack.

Related News

Analogue to Digital Conversion Interrupts on an ATmega168

Analogue to Digital Conversion Interrupts on an ATmega168A

Back in February, we wrote a post on Analogue to Digital Conversion. Many people mentioned...

Pogo Pins and Photographing LCDs

This post is a new product post, a tutorial and a behind the scenes look,...

Analogue to Digital Conversion on an ATmega168

Many AVR microcontrollers are capable of doing Analogue to Digital Conversion. The ATmega168 has 6...

One Comment

  1. stonechild

    It would be nice if you offered acorn nuts or some kind of rubber pad for the bottom of the stack. Maybe they’re here and I haven’t found them. That happened for me with the power supply parts.

Leave a reply

Privacy Preference Center

Shopping Cart