While it’d be really cool to have USB-PD working with this, I’d love to have one, maybe 2, of these regardless as long as it’s USB 3 or 4 speeds. Mostly just to have a few extra ports.
Without completely reading the entire looong thread, it seems it’s not quite done and ready for more than prototype construction? I’d love to buy 1 or 2 when it is ready. Even though I won’t have my FW 16 for another few months at a minimum.
In case you missed it in the long thread, the current board does not have USB-PD. And adding USB-PD seems unlikely, due to space limitations and what one would have to fit in to enable USB-PD.
Making this product fully PD compliant would obviously require maximum integration/minimization, ie. an ASIC that integrates all functionality(power conversion, protocol handling, USB Hub, etc.) into a single IC. I’m not aware such a thing exists or that there’s even sufficient demand for some chip manufacturing company to actually make and sell one.
Still, with the current proposal by @tbe it is very useful to many. Thanks for the work 
Nah, kind of. It’ll be a PD device to get 3A from the laptop (so you can draw ~1.5A per connected device), without PD negotiation it will limit the current to 1.5A total. You can’t charge the laptop through the hub tho.
Ah, yes. I forgot about that. Though, I think people asking about USB-PD are likely talking about charging the laptop.
Nope, saw that, and while it’d be a nice-to-have, definitely not much of a priority for myself.
Are you going to be releasing the full (kicad?) PCB + schematic files? (as in not just the screenshot…) I would love to have a cheap one of these in my framework laptop!
And I would be happy to buy within the EU
Any updates for the expansion card?
Also interested in this – I’d love to get one of these for my laptop so I can connect my mouse and keyboard!
Which links to:
Triple-Screen Laptop DONE RIGHT!
Hello folks,
Sorry, I have been absent for a while due to various reasons, one of them is having other hobbies too 
. This project takes way more effort than I initially thought and I might not have the time, knowledge and resources to make this expansion card an actual product 
. Thanks for all your support and interest in this project it has been quite fun so far and I’ve learned a lot designing this .
I promised to make the design files public tho, so everyone interested can have a look (and most likely improve it), so the time invested may have some benefit for the community and probably someone can make a product or small production run out of it. Before shelling out 1000s of units I’d recommend building another prototype and run some compliance testing, this is not a production ready design.
The design files are uploaded here: glx-seven/dual-c_expansioncard: This is a prototype of a dual USB-C expansioncard for the Framework-Laptop (github.com)
I might come back to this project and develop it further but I don’t have concrete plans or a timeline. In the meantime maybe someone else has interest in having a look or taking it further .
. Thank you for your service. Good luck on your next project.
On the bright side, it seems we’ll eventually get Josh Cook’s version of the expansion card in addition of this one’s schematics.
Oh, this is interesting. Haven’t followed this one, just Josh Cook’s.
Any thoughts on doing a group order of just the PCBs? I’d get a couple, and 3D print up my own cases for them. I’m sure some folks in Josh’s thread and this thread might be interested as well.
What are the capabilities? Full 3.2g2 10Gbps speeds on both ports? Any USB-PD?
The ports are both 5GBit, there is a PD controller but it only requests 5V/3A from the laptop so it can provide 5V/1.5A to both ports, charging is not possible.
“Just” ordering the boards is not as simple as it seems, that’s part of why I can’t continue here (without immense effort).
Also I’m not sure if these can be reliably manufactured for a reasonable price, these are loaded with parts on both sides and the host connector is (I guess) not standard pick-and-place. Also the parts go quite close to the edges of the board, so for my understanding not too great from a DFM perspective.
I did hand assemble the prototype but that took quite a while (but double sided reflow worked better than expected).
Side-note, a friend of mine (that has nothing to do with electronics) said “how difficult can that be, look at these sandwiched iPhone logic boards”. Well yes you can probably do it but not for reasonable costs in like one-off volumes since your standard-assembly line can probably not handle that.
Ah, too bad about the chip and close to the edges. Yeah, that’s an issue from DFM. And had assembled reflow, yikes. That’s a lot of work.
And LOL, “how hard can it be”. Right.
There are 10G capable and native USB-C hub ICs available from microchip but they have substantially larger packages so I’d say they are even tougher to implement, that’s why I chose the one I got. There’s also a VIA chip that can apparently handle one PD charging port but it seems you can’t just buy that. Also you’d have to manage the 20V (or whatever your charger provides) to 5V for the other port plus 3.3V and 1.2V for the USB3 part. Unless you want to stack a few boards on top of each other I guess you’ll quickly run out of space.
There might be integrated solutions for that but resources for these seem to be impossible to obtain for non-businesses.
Thanks for putting as much time and effort into this as you did! I was getting more and more excited as I read along all the updates since I last checked in on this project, I hope someone else is able to take it across the finish line. Good luck in your other hobbies and projects!