This may come as kinda janky but I saw a few posts recently and these just linked up:
We get a RK3588S Single board computer (we need a low profile one or even a Banana Pi/Orange Pi core board) with some kind of cooler fan (not sure passive cooling works).
The reason for it is because it comes with a decent GPU for graphical acceleration yet probably a somewhat powerful enough ARM CPU chip that I think is easier to find, the other spectrum would be Snapdragons and Apple ARM but I remember the latter would definitely be more powerful but kinda closed and very expensive.
Then a PCB to connect the keyboard and touchpad to the SBC:
We connect the Framework display to the SBC via this PCB:
These two solutions seems reasonably low profile enough to fit into the Framework chassis.
So currently, what we are missing is:
- How to connect the speakers/mic and audio jack board.
- How do we connect the webcam.
- How to connect an NVMe drive (so far all low profile RK3588 SBCs aren’t, at least I couldn’t find one, all uses some kind of eMMC flash or SD Card, I remember it supports up to PCIe 2.0 though).
- USB extenders for some IO (might have to 3D print the expansion cards then get some extenders to the USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, there’s not a lot of IO on such an SBC anyway).
- How to connect the battery and maybe a PCB to charge?
One idea for the SBC is we could crowdfund Firefly/Solidrun/Khadas/Radxa/Mekotronics/Pine64 (I am not sure if Orange/Banana Pi and other makers would) to make one for us but I have no idea how much that would cost. The bootloader support is another question. Though if we have to make a custom board, we might as well, make a whole new mainboard that is compatible with the current Framework chassis with socketed DDR4 sodimms.
Another way would be to custom make some kind of carrier mainboard like the Nexdock that connects to Framework’s components while connecting to a core board module.
Maybe someone with more technical expertise would give more input here?