Dongle Hider

The latest BIOS should have it.

But from one report in that thread it may not be fixed 100% yet.

BIOS guide

@Moe_Wigs shut up and take my money

1 Like

Very droll. :smiley:

1 Like

Any chance Framework will make a dongle hider card? Or is someone else selling it?

The only other laptop I’m considering, the Thinkbook 16 G4+ has this little flap which hides a recessed USB-A port for dongles, and I’m irrationally smitten with the thought of having my Logitech Unifying receiver neatly tucked away (without me having to spend hours doing some hack job to come up with my own dongle hider contraption).

I have a Thinkbook 14 G4+, it’s an excellent laptop. The ethernet port is very tight though, I need to take the bottom plate off and file the latch slightly, so it opens a little more, but not be too loose.
Or make a hider yourself, it’s simply a usb to usb c adapter removed from its case, a bit fiddly to do, especially if it’s a metal case. I don’t think a normal printer would cope, the usb surround looks quite thick on the photos, but, top and bottom are less than 0.5mm thick. It’s essentially a recessed USB A port. And, all my enclosures slide and lock together using rails and tabs, no need for any screws or fasteners. Which, is why nylon is the perfect material.

2 Likes

This is a new version of my previous hider, the old one was too shallow and the braces were too flexible. I can’t edit my old post to update it, so I’ll post it here. The narrower braces are made to fit against the back wall.

dongle hider.stl (899.7 KB)

10 Likes

Can you share an STL file for these, they look great!

I don’t have the STL for these, I already explained how I lost them. These were printed months ago, but I hadn’t figured out how to remove the adapter from the metal case without damaging it. You can see from the first image how rough the removal turned out, I damaged the rubber protective coat, until, I developed a way to free them without damage, it’s a fairly long process, which I wouldn’t like to do too many times, involving a file and a lot of effort. The other type of case, above, I edited from the the upload I’d previously made.

Hey :slight_smile: ,
just had an idea how to make a true dongle hider. How about we could create a PCB that includes some kind of USB switch IC, then we could solder the logi (unify or bolt receiver PCB) directly into place and hide it inside the module while also having a free usable USB A port on the module.

I opened one of my bold receivers and the PCB for it looks like this:


Greetings,
Ben

Why not go one step further and just put it inside the laptop?

My current plan is to steal the usb off the fingerprint sensor I am never gonna use anyway and put the receiver into the laptop. Don’t have my framework jet but I did that on my t480s and it work great.

Keep in mind that thing does draw quite a bit of power though (and it doesn’t seem to sleep right) so with a more modern amd cpu that may make idle power signifficantly worse

1 Like

metal shell creates a faraday cage and kills the signal.

You sure there aren’t enough holes to make it work? The t480s has a lot of metal too and that works just fine.

Just scrolling through this, it’s surprising to me that no one has put a USB hub chip into one of these so that there’s still a USB port on the other side, I don’t see why you couldn’t (I’m assuming there are relatively compact usb hub chips for sale, but I might be wrong)

Today i received two USB-A Expansion Cards for testing and it looks like that a unifi or bolt receiver would fit toghether with a USB 2.0 switching IC. I might try it with the TS3USB221
from Texas Instruments.


8 Likes

What a cool idea! Please share how it goes, I’d love to have a two in one card with the receiver and a USB-A port.

2 Likes

Seconded, this would eliminate the need for multiport cards for me

Just want to be sure that you knew that the chip you linked is only a switch. It won’t feed both ports simultaneously. For that, you’d need a usb hub. That chip also requires external control to select with port is active. Though that could be done with a small physical slider switch.

1 Like

Hey @MJ1,
yes thanks for pointing it out.
This Hub IC from microchip USB2422 should be better suited. For prototypig it might be nice to test with the NanoHub (2-port) from muxtronics.

1 Like

Unfortunately, that board has been out-of-stock for a long time, Iirc.

Since apparently no one has posted this here yet, this now exists as a product, it’s just missing the shell: https://www.tindie.com/products/crimier/framework-laptop-usb-a-ugment-expansion-card/

I sent in a request via tindie to the creator but no response after 2ish days, @Arya can post here if there are any updates.

1 Like