Lowkey love this thing. Also my first time soldering on something I intend to use, so thanks for forcing me to learn that handy skill 
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I can confirm that this works great for keychron usb dongles. However you do need wire snips to cut away the plastic on the dongle to get to the PCB.
I finally got to test my dongle hider today since I received my FW16, and I have a possibly stupid question: when I plug something into the usb port, the dongle stops working. Is that intended behavior, or did I do something wrong?
Shouldn’t happen unless your dongle has a really bad antenna. You are using a plastic enclosure right?
heya sorry if ive ben blind but i saw some poeple could order these before but i cant find the place to either order or put down im interested for another batch sorry if i missed it so was curious where i have to go
I think that was through Josh Cook’s website. Probably a college kid that took on too much and eventually couldn’t handle it. probably. Nobody knows since he just disappeared.
So afaik there is no place to order one right now, though I might be wrong.
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Since about two month ago his website https://i2clabs.com.au/ is no longer available. So, I don’t expect him to return producing, selling or shipping anything.
Domain seems to have expired, I just hope Josh is ok somehow.
Very late response, but yes. Oddly enough, the dongle only stops working sometimes, and I noticed this in the GitHub repo
When connected to a USB4 capable expansion card slot and an external USB 3 device is plugged in, the internal dongle stops working, but is still displayed as connected in Windows.
As soon as the USB 3 device gets unplugged, the internal dongle immediately begins to work again (probably without a re-enumeration).
USB 2 devices seem to work without a problem for the most part, although one of the tested USB thumb drives took a few re-plugs until it enumerated.
This behaviour is not seen on the other non-USB4-capable expansion card slots, there USB 3 devices work great alongside the internal dongle
I am on Fedora 43 KDE edition, so I guess this problem is also present outside of windows.
There is also someone who has an etsy shop for these. I got the retrofit one in august 2025 and it works great! I think the retrofit design is slightly different so that you can swap the guts of an official usb A expansion card. That’s what I ended up doing.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/DarkModsUK?listing_id=1709239840&from_page=listing
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I ordered from here and it arrived just yesterday. Seems to work pretty well!
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Would it matter if it was one of the aluminium ones? Does that interfere with the signal?
I’m using one of the aluminum casings and it still works, but I do think the signal is a bit weaker as a result. I have to keep the “dongle” card on the side of the laptop closer to my mouse since it’s not right next to it. The USB A cards are all full aluminum casings so you’d need to modify it if you wanted plastic.
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Ah, good to know. I only own aluminium ones but if I order a card I can just have my brother print a case for me if that works better.
Thanks!
Keep in mind if you order the retrofit dongleplus from the place i linked, it comes with a plastic half case. I dont think it would fit with the other half of the official framework case bur its built in a way that you could use it as is c:
@LeoDJ Gotta say great job on the power optimisation, I just tried it with a logitech bolt dongle and after I whitelisted it from usb autosuspend the idle power difference between no expension card and donglehider+ with the bolt dongle disapeared in the margin of error making it quite viable to leave plugged in.
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OK. I finally did it. I pulled the trigger and bought the full version of the Framework Dongle Hider Plus (with soldered-in Logitech Unifying Dongle with USB-A pass thru and a 3D printed enclosure) from DarkModsUK’s store on Etsy. Shipping from UK to Texas was expensive, but hopefully, I’ll have it in a week or two.
All in, the cost was a little over $72 for something that really shouldn’t have cost that much. But I’m finally done with it.
This became a bit of a journey. I’ve wanted one of these since my first Framework 13 laptop (currently on my 2nd).
Not sure why something so relatively unimportant held my attention as much as this has. For me, putting an end to the hours I’ve spent looking into this for a solution (and not finding one) justified coughing up some extra cash to be done with it.
I’ll try to remember to report back here once I have it and have tested it out.
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