Greetings! My company designs and sells high-end inspection equipment for the aerospace industry. We typically bundle an off-the-shelf laptop with our custom box of electronics. However, we recently had a request from a customer to build a more tightly-integrated system, where the laptop computer and our custom electronics are all together in one package. Rather than completely redesigning everything, I had the idea of re-using Framework’s modular components and combining them with our custom board.
Basically, the idea would be to build a custom bottom case that was significantly thicker than a normal laptop and use that extra space to put our custom PCB, plus some additional connectors on the side. Everything else—the electronics inside, the keyboard and trackpad, the display and top shell, etc.—would just be off-the-shelf parts purchased from Framework. Our custom bottom enclosure would be designed to pair/mate with the Framework Laptop parts. Essentially, we would double the thickness of the bottom chassis in order to add a lower deck containing our custom board.
My question is this: do you have CAD or other equivalent models of your laptop chassis available, which we could use as the basis for our design? I found your GitHub repository for the 13" laptop (GitHub - FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13: Documentation for the Mainboard and other modules in the Framework Laptop 13), and I see there are a few parts of the design available there, but I’m not finding the laptop case/clamshell models. And anyway, I think this design would be based on the Framework Laptop 16, as our custom PCB (which we would mount as a second “deck”, below the normal Framework Laptop components, in our custom bottom shell) is relatively large.
I understand if you don’t want to distribute these designs publicly, since the complete package does represent a sellable product for your company. I would be willing to sign an NDA and other applicable non-compete clauses to promise that my company will not go into competition by building laptops, and that we will only use the designs that you provide for the purposes of building customized, special-purpose equipment.
Alternatively, if you have the design and manufacturing capabilities in-house for doing something like this, would you be interested in subcontracting for us on this project?
As a follow-up question: it would be fantastic if the final product were a ruggedized design similar to the Panasonic ToughBook or the Getac, which would meet military standards/specifications. Do you have any plans to develop a ruggedized version of your chassis? Or do you know of any vendors who are already doing so? Is this something you would be interested in doing as part of a collaboration or for a fee?
