This seems obvious but how about an expansion card that is a battery pack maybe even a two way on so you could use it to charge the laptop and use it to charge other devices. I know the expansion cards aren’t that big but I would imagine 2 or even 4 of them plugged in would be enough for another few hours. You could also have one with a cooling fan for heat dissipation.
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Nothing stopping you from buying an external battery that can charge your laptop, though. I would avoid such a small battery for a variety of reasons, but primarily because it is super inefficient to carry several of those around when I could carry one device that holds 20,000+ mAh of juice.
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I agree with N.P, a power bank is the way to go. USB-C power banks are abundant.
Just for fun, here’s a rough estimate of the potential capacity of a card battery: based on the schematics, you might be able to fit up to 26x28x5 mm^3 of battery inside, leaving a bit of length for circuitry. That’s 0.00364 L, or 1.092 Wh if we optimistically assume 300 Wh/L, or ~2% of the capacity of the actual battery.
That doesn’t seem efficient.
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Would it be possible to have an extra battery that is the length and width of the whole bottom of the framework laptop?
I guess then you would have to figure out what to do about the air vents on the bottom. And how to attach it…
and the fire marshal…
That’s the approach they made 10 years ago with the Thinkpad X220, here’s how it looks with the addon battery:
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I’m just terrified of a battery like that on a laptop. Cooling would suffer and my lord it would be sketchy. Lithium batteries are no joke, just ask Note 7 owners.
I still think a battery bank with a low profile right angle connector would be ideal.
Alternative idea: instead of attaching the battery to the bottom, attach it to the back of the screen/lid/top case/whatever it’s called. That way it wouldn’t cover the fans, but would still utilize the full area of the laptop. Potential problems with balancing the laptop, and of course you’re using up a port, but the first could be solved with a kickstand of some sort (or possibly a counterweight, though I don’t like that idea), and the second isn’t of much consequence as people have said in other threads that it would be possible to make a card have both PD over USB-C and a separate USB-C port that cannot carry power into the computer. The trickiest part would be getting the laptop to think that the external battery was part of the laptop’s internal battery. I’m not an engineer or anything though.
At that point just get a low profile right angle usb c cable or some other trick with an expansion card/slot. Then just velcro a battery bank to the back of the screen. I really don’t think there’s a market for a solution like you’re proposing. It’ll be jank either way, might as well use jank that I already own.
@Zax Yeah, probably. The best option would likely be for Framework themselves to make it an option to have a deeper bottom case, and also sell larger batteries to fill that space. Still somewhat jank though.
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