Cannot charge framework 13 on 2A phone charger or car usb port

Community Support
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1

Hello,
I know this is a documented limitation. However:

  1. It works fine with a Macbook Pro (both intel and m3)
  2. It is pretty irritating

In my car I there are usb ports for charging phones etc. A macbook pro can be charged on these usb ports - not fast, but they charge. As long as you do light work you can work forever on a macbook pro m3, including watching movies. You can also use a samsung phone fast charger (2a) to slowly charge your mac.

If I try the same with my framework laptop 13 (amd 7840U) then the charging led comes on for second and then turns off again. It totally refuses to charge.

Other than that I love my framework laptop.

2

Welcome to the forum.

These are usb ports built into the car? USB-A, USB-C, USB PD (Power Delivery), and wattage output? 2A is just current, it doesn’t tell actual power / wattage.

3

long known problem on Framework Laptop 13 AMD 7040, I don’t think we will get this fixed.

1 Like
4

To charge the FL13 AMD version you’ll need a charger with at least 9V2A

5

Is this fixed in the AI 300 model, or any other model?

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The intel ones apparently can, the amd ones are physically also capable of doing it (and you at least used to be able to trick them into doing it) but something in the pd controller refuses to actually activate charging (power capablity is negotiated and the charge controller is being configured but the power mux which is controlled by the pd controller never actually activates the port).

Wile it isn’t super useful and actual pd chargers are extremely common these days it is still a shame and I still hold some faint hope this gets fixed at some point. The pd controller firmware is one of the least polished part of the amd fw 13 at this point imo and unfortunately also one that isn’t open source so we are at the mercy of framework to maybe get around to fixing it. The good part is that the ai300 mainboard and the 7x40u ones have pretty much exactly the same hardware as far as pd goes (except that the ai ones use a different re-driver) so it is likely we could benefit from any future fixes. even the 16 uses mostly the same setup (same charge controller, though wired a bit differently and same pd controller) but it has a different way of doing power muxing so likely also significantly more different pd-controller firmware.

I do wish they’d put a few more resources onto polishing the firmware side as that makes a pretty big difference on the perceived quality side.

1 Like
7

Thank you very much, that is very useful.

When you say re-driver do you mean a reverse engineered driver/firmware?

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No the redrivers for the usb4, that’s a physical component on the board.

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