PCMCIA!
I found a 100M PCMCIA Ethernet card.
But you also have ExpressCard.
*pain *
Yeah I am not sure about this.
An Oculink female bay would be amazing!
The newly released GPD Win MAX 2 (handheld gaming PC) has one and it seems to be a really good solution for a cheap eGPU. Also, the GPD WinMax 2 is using the AMD Ryzen 5 7640U so it makes me think that it could be possible in the new AMD Frameworks.
See this video which summaries the benefits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMASet1yLzg
7 Likes
Oculink connection would be amazing to have as a individual expansion bay, but also added to other expansion bays (specially if it does not increase the price too much). For example an extra battery expansion bay with oculink or even the mobile gpu expansion bay with oculink, so you can connect a eGPU when you get home.
4 Likes
Yes I was also going to mention that. I think GPD will like this cooperation.
Ayaneo already jumped on.
Regarding the implementation, I donāt know how itās implemented. It might be a simple ā¦
Oh Oculink! Basically SFF8643. Yeah basically a PCIe riser. I can see this being a good solution.
I think a oculink + battery card is very doable, since Oculink is basically a PCIe interface so āadaptingā it from the Framework Expansion Connector is not going to be expensive. The rest can go to battery.
Or tie it in with the āmoar IOā card, since technically you can Oculink other things (server memory/storage).
2 Likes
There are a lot of concepts that are cool and Id like to see them all thrive, but I expect to purchase each of these if they were well designed and priced appropriately.
*additional or āSecondā battery
*Mega I/O - any/all of HDMI-IN, DP or HDMI Out, double usb-c, double usb-a, 10g ethernet, full size SD card, etc.
*dGPU
I hope there is a barrel power connector at the back too, to free up one expansion card slot on the side.
6 Likes
For my usecase with the 16inch Framework (which is programming work) an Expansion Bay Battery would be the first thing Iād buy. Battery lifespan is the bottleneck for me.
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Yeah those 6 slots are a bit on the low sideā¦ 
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Would love a true 6th and not essentially just 5, but fair point.
My XPS has 7 (5L and 2R)
With the new power details, OTOH, the FW 16 would have me at
3 Left
USB-C (for charging primarily)
Ethernet
USB-A
3 Right
USB-A (for logitech dongle)
HDMI
Mostly unconnected/as needed rotating card.
- HDMI/DP video capture.
- VGA/DVI video output.
- VGA/DVI video capture.
- 3.5in sata disk slot.
- Cellular voice/data modem.
- POTS interface.
- 4x Expansion card slots.
- Multi-port Ethernet interface.
Most any combination of the above would also be welcome. Expesically POTS and cellular on the same card.
3 Likes
This could be interesting, Iām imagining an Expansion Bar or something similar that allows ports to face towards or away from the user.
2 Likes
Facing the user? How would that work?
The card slides in like a normal expansion card, but it has a long body about three or four expansion card widths out from the laptop. Facing the user are several slots for expansion cards.
The biggest thing for me would honestly be an extra battery, aside from having a graphics card.
7 Likes
An Oculink port, an nvme slot and one or several slots for standard expansion modules.
It might be a good idea to have the option of having bigger expansion modules (the size of two standard expansion modules + the size of the support in the middle) and make the central support removable so that this can be either two standard modules or one bigger module.
I wish framework would have done that for the expansion modules on the sides of the laptop as many of the suggestions from users would not fit in the size of a standard module (for example 2 USB-A ports).
I can imagine a bigger module with 2 USB-A, a 3.5 jack and maybe an HDMI port (all sharing the bandwidth of 1 USB-C at the back of the module) and also one USB-C which is a direct pass through to the second USB-C at the back of the module.
3 Likes
An intel chip based ethernet port please!
To fit the different requirements of different people, maybe a different, larger expansion card system that can fit larger ports like RJ45ā¦
Maybe analyze the mechanical requirement of all the reasonable requests here, and start a larger module design base on that. The expansion bay itself can be a good chassis for the new expansion system.
Also a single expansion slot doesnāt nessarly need to fit in only one expansion module right? What if you can have a single large slot that you can install either a single large module, or more then one small module?
Mobile LTE adapter.
Itās a mildly surprising omission from the FW series, these are quite common at this price point. The adapter probably canāt fit flush with the sidewall of the chassis, but the Ethernet adapter doesnāt either. Thatās no big deal; external 4g adapters for example always hang out as a dongle, awkward and annoying, yet people buy them. At least some of this one would be inside the laptop body.
Seems kind of obvious for some enterprising soul to design one of these and stick in Marketplaceā¦ if legalities on mobile signal devices donāt get in the way too much.
bluetooth dedicated audio device, preferably with some form of pass-through. There are a number of devices on the market that tend to be built for getting bluetooth audio on game consoles, for example this one for the nintendo switch. Since the peripheral itself is the one doing the pairing this avoids the need to copy the pairing keys between operating systems when dual booting while also enabling the use of bluetooth audio on operating systems that have poor or non-existent bluetooth audio support.
A much better GPU than the one theyāre offering. Make it big and chonky, I donāt care.
8 Likes
I want a battery pack with an Oculink connection.
Edit: Or high performance cooling + Oculink
5 Likes
ARM compatibility module.
Back in the pre-Intel Mac days, there were a variety of Nubus and later PCI cards that basically included a full PC motherboard and CPU that you could add in to give your Mac the ability to run DOS/Windows natively. Some cleverness was required on the software side (drivers) to either allow you to run within a window in MacOS, or at least to share the keyboard/mouse/graphics of the main machine.
Today a lot of us are splitting our work between x86 and ARM development/testing. Having native ARM support within the same box would be very handy. The simplest version of this is probably a Raspberry Pi in an Expansion Bay form factor, with a serial console that connects directly to the main host over PCIe. But there are lots of cleverer approaches tooā¦
1 Like