I was actually just thinking of revisiting this topic, because the top case of my Framework 13 is soon going to be full of stickers, and I think it would be neat to replace the whole top case with a clean one and put more, new stickers on it. That means I may have an extra top case that I could cut up or mess with, without risking taking my laptop out of commission.
I’ll have to hunt it down, but we did at some point get the pinout for the framework eDP connector (the connector on the mainboard that goes to the screen), so we may be able to pull the power line to the backlight from there and route it to some LEDs in the logo, which would pull off the effect without having to mess with the screen itself, because that’s a risk I don’t really want to take.
Checking the pinout, the backlight isn’t directly controlled by changing voltage (if only we were so lucky), but by a PWM signal sent on one of the pins. I think it would be possible to make a little circuit board to manage that, but fitting it into the top case beneath the display sounds remarkably difficult.
Actually creating the clear logo isn’t a walk in the park either. I think getting the size and shape exactly right in CAD is doable, but what to manufacture it out of is a tricky one. I don’t have access to one, but a resin 3D printer might work, or even a standard FDM printer if we can get transparent filament. Cutting acrylic to size could work, but I think you’d run into thickness limitations there.
I do have an extra screen, so I could try cutting open the back of it to get backlighting to show through (I do think that’s the simplest option, but also the riskiest). If I could get someone from the team to give me some kind of schematic so I know what to cut and how far, etc, that would be much appreciated, going in blind is what’s stopped me from going for it in the past.
This is also all just for the Framework 13, because that’s what I have. It looks from a glance at the marketplace listing for the two top cases that they have the same size logo, and it makes sense for them to, but an application of this idea on the 16 would present different challenges.