Awesome work!
Have you tested (orhas anyone measured) how well two typical USB-C cables will fit at the same time without being in each others way?
Iād also be interested in purchasing these, 6 of them if the price if the price is reasonable enough.
My lab-supply just came in 
, I did some quick testing to ensure voltages are fine and the power-gating for the ports works as intended.
The power-gating has an issue (because I didnāt pay close enough attention to the datasheet) but that could be resolved by swapping a single resistor to another value .
It works kind-of, the USB 2.0 part works fine but it somehow doesnāt enumerate the 3.0 part, Iām getting an āPort Reset Failedā error there 
. Iāll have a closer look to that to investigate if its probably a wiring mistake.
Edit: Hm, by going through the schematics I may have mixed up the USB 3ās RX- and TX-lines on the plug (so the TX from the PC goes against the TX on the hub instead of the RX), but I have to verify that. If thats the case, it can be fixed relatively easy with a new revision of the small daughter-board.
But at least itās looking relatively good by now:
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Looking good! Excited to see your progress.
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Nice job bro, Iām rooting for ya 
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I would actually prefer being able to buy the board by its self for a reasonable price. Then I could put it together and 3d print the rest myself. In any case, if the price canāt be brought down to one people are willing to pay, then he can always just make them for himself, or a smaller run for the ones who are willing to pay a high price.
And who knows, maybe Framework themselves would be interested in producing this.
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This is looking litā¦ Hopefully it is just the two lines mixed upā¦
They are aware of this project at least since they posted this project on their social media ā¦
Maybe they can license it or something ā¦
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How is the charging behaviour with this module? Does it support USB-PD?
The one thing Iād say is if you could manage to get the spacing the same as the MacBooks that would enable compatibility with a ton of docking stations and port expanders as long as they arenāt expecting thunderbolt 3 speeds on both ports, and honestly I think the number that expects that is really low since the accessories for the MacBook Air and many others were only USB-C and not thunderbolt because the components for thunderbolt had not gotten small enough.
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USB-PD support would be complicated. I donāt think thereās space for it.
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To my knowledge, there is no practical way to support USB alternate mode with an expansion card like this, so docking stations would be limited to USB 3 only.
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Hereās an adapter with 3x USB-C and 1x PD for reference:
https://www.delock.com/produkt/64174/merkmale.html
Maybe the dual USB-C expansion card can be realized using those partsā¦
Note
DisplayPort Alternate Mode (DP Alt Mode) is not supported, so no video signals are transmitted and no monitors can be connected.
I had not even considered that strangely enough. Its indeed more like a very big USB stick than an extra internal SSDā¦
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Well, Framework have 1TB and 2TB expansion modules already listed ā¦
It only supports basic USB 3.1 Gen1 (5G), with no fancy addons like PD, alt-mode (displays) or something.
Thatās in my opinion the biggest downside of USB-C, you never know what the ports are actually capable of, causing confusion at some point. A good example are the AMD Framework devices (or this hub here 
) where even in the same device some ports support this and some that.
Iām having a hard time getting the basic hub onto the quite small PCB area (26x30mm) inside an expansion card. If sky is the limit pricewise then probably. The hub-chipset used has basically the same functionality as the one I used, but I donāt think thereās space for the PD-controller, even when adding another daughter-board (would probably look interesting tho) but I think it wont fit in the restricted height and at some point the power converters needed could impact the USB-performance because of interferences but Iām no professional here, this is still a hobby-project (pretty involved for that tho).
Additionally some of these more advanced chips donāt have publicly available datasheets or design resources and you would have to sign an NDA contract as a company to get these things. Thatās why I chose the Mircochip hub-IC, there are reference designs, design guides, checklists and datasheets available.
I think we can agree on that this adds one additional port, so Iām not sure how far we should push it in terms of complexity.
Also a quick update: I have fixed the error on the daughter-boardās upstream port in the design files and did order a few (5, thatās the minimum quantity) of them, when they arrive Iāll report back .
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The hub-chipset used has basically the same functionality as the one I used, but I donāt think thereās space for the PD-controller, even when adding another daughter-boardā¦
I had the impression, the PD functionality had already been ruled out and the issue was getting both ports to have USB SuperSpeed (5Gbps), hence my reference suggestion.
Iām sorry if I misunderstood and youāre already able to realize that with your current design.
Canāt wait to hear about your further progress.
Apologies in case I overlooked this and my question has been answered before.
Thanks for the details.
My primary question was trying to understand if my laptop could be charged through the module or not.
From what I understand charging requires USB-PD so the answer would be a no
This in and of itself is worth itās weight in goldā¦
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Heya! First of all: congrats on getting the boards built 
Very excited to see how this progresses.
I havenāt been following the thread that much, so sorry if this is obvious to everyone else but I thought Iād ask to clarify:
Do you mean that NEITHER of the ports will support charging/ DP, or that only one of them will? I have no idea how USB-C works tbh, so I donāt know if both are out of scope.
Iām currently trying to figure out if a framework would work for me (since I have pretty steep port requirements) and this seems like an important distinction.
Thanks, and good luck!
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