External display loses signal when charging via docking station

Framework Laptop 13
#1

Hello,

I normally have all of my peripherals running through a CableMatters docking station: power, HDMI, and another USB hub with keyboard, mouse, and headset. I’ve noticed that when the battery is full and charging, the light on the side of the USB-C expansion card will change colors for a few seconds. While the light is briefly turned white, my external display will lose all signal and then recover after the light goes back to orange.

So far I’ve confirmed this problem occurs when running Arch Linux from an internal SSD, and when running Windows from an external SSD. This makes me inclined to believe that the problem is hardware related.

Has anyone else experienced this or know of a fix? A quick fix would probably be to plug my power into a dedicated port, but I only have two USB-C ports as of right now (will work for internal SSD but not external).

Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

[RESPONDED] Quirky USB Port
#2

Have you tried using a different usb c port for the dock? To rule out a bad expansion card.

#3

Are you on the 11th gen laptop and do you have the battery charge limiter set below 100%? If so, I’ve experienced the same problem and the only way I was able to make it stop happening was setting the charge limiter back to 100%. I contacted framework support but after a month they concluded:

This concludes that the Thunderbolt 4 on 11th Gen requires 100% battery in order to sustain the connection on your device.

Will there be anything else we can help you with?

Another user here had similar symptoms and managed to make it stop by setting the charge current to 0 using ectool.

#4

@Tom1 I’m on the 12th gen intel mainboard. I did have the battery charge limit set to 95%. I set it back to 100% and haven’t had any problems since.

I’m not sure if I agree completely with their response to you, though. I have been frequently disconnecting the battery via BIOS for gaming and the issue doesn’t occur. It’s only when the battery is connected and set to a limit less than 100%. Seems like a bug to me.

#5

Ah interesting, so this problem impacts the 12th gen boards too! Hopefully framework is investigating this.

Yeah, I just assumed they misspoke and said “requires 100% battery” instead of “requires 100% battery limit” but I never confirmed with them.