Y’know what would be cool? A battery expansion card that you pop in the FW laptop to charge with like LEDs on the side to indicate charge state and then you put that in the mouse as a power source.
Alternatively you can use the USB-C port where you put the battery card into as just a port you plug a cable into which then transforms it into a wired mouse.
Would love some feedback! Might make this into a little winter break project. 
Random Idea, what about something similar to what HP was doing back in the day with their Pop-Out Mouse:
I have an idea to make a device which allows to create an adapter from 2 expansion cards and the device itself as
expansion card<–>device<–>expansion card
Since I currently know absolutely nothing about expansion cards, can someone tell me if it is realistic and if not where the problem is???
This is an interesting but deeply flawed concept.
Generally, a connection interfaces require one “host” and at least one “client” (also called master/slave). This is called asymmetric communication. This is not a universal rule, but it applies to all of the connections implemented in Framework expansion cards (USB, HDMI, DP, SD, and even the Ethernet card in the sense that the network interface expects a network on one side and a computer on the other). Adapters must support this, and generally only support one direction of communication.
In the case of a Framework expansion card, the “host” is the Framework laptop. Thus, the USB-C end connects to the host device (pretend that the Ethernet expansion card doesn’t exist for a moment). Remember this.
Now back to the “universal adapter”. Let’s just call the central piece the “universal adapter”. The expansion cards would have to plug into the universal adapter by USB-C. I know this because, if not, the remaining exposed ports would not be useful.
Here’s an example for the HDMI and DP expansion cards:
<-HDMI-> expansioncard <-USBC-> universaladapter <-USBC-> expansioncard <-DP->
Recall that the USB-C end is the host end. Thus, the universal adapter is the host of both connections. Do you see the problem? Neither the HDMI nor DP port goes to the host. That means you can’t plug this into a computer, so it’s not useful. The expansion cards are not designed to communicate in the direction that you want them to.
You’ll have the same problem for any* combination of expansion cards.
Putting aside the fact that almost all combinations of expansion cards make no sense. SD to HDMI? Sanity check failed.
*Yes, I did gloss over the Ethernet expansion card. In theory, you could create a device that uses it (you could create half of an HDMI over Ethernet system, I suppose) but in that case there is no reason to use the Ethernet expansion card–just integrate an Ethernet connector.
Hi all, does anyone have any plans on working on creating a magsafe 2 expansion card? Does anyone have any idea how magsafe 2 works. The new version of magsafe seems super cool and I have access to a lot of these chargers but I cant use them. I thought that my framework can probably take it, I just don’t know where to start? any advice/help would be greatly appriciated 
You want to create something like the magsafe 2 powerbank?
That would not be very helpful for laptops, as they have a much higher rate of discharge and need way more power than something as small as magsafe could deliver.
If you are looking for a cable, someone has already done this.
I think they were referring to creating an expansion card that can use one of Apple’s MagSafe 2 charging cables, which are used for MacBooks, because they are often around people who use MacBooks.
This cable is not to be confused with:
Love Apple’s clear and unambiguous product names 
edit: like this cable: Apple 85W MagSafe 2 Power Adapter - Apple
Yes, sorry for the poor wording on the original post, I want to know how possible it would be to create an expansion card that takes in Magsafe 2. I have no idea if it can be converted to USB-C and if so how so I was wondering if anyone was looking at doing anything similar
It should be possible. Per the Wikipedia article on MagSafe, the outer two pins are GND, the inner two pins are VBUS (either 14.5, 16.5, 18.5, or 20V DC), and the middle pin is a data pin that allows the charger to know information about the charger (power usage and serial number) and output LED values for charging accordingly.
I’ve seen female USB-C boards that are programmed for a specific voltage, and while I know male boards exist as well, I’ve yet to find one (if anyone knows of any, please link to them). Basically, the way I would solve this is by getting a 20V version of a male USB-C board and hardwiring its V+ and GND pins to a 20V version of the MagSafe port. I may be overly simplifying here, but the existence of these MagSafe to USB-C cables that are hardwired for either 15V or 20V (I have linked to the 20V MacBook Pro version) leads me to believe that this should be possible.
Further update - This MagSafe to USB-C female adapter reminds me a bit of the card that was requested here, but it’s still not quite the same thing.
Keep in mind that any adapter made here will have the potential to destroy whatever port it’s plugged into. Especially if the adapter has data lines connected instead of just power.
This would indeed be neat to see, I do agree. However, it may be prohibitively complex due to Apple’s proprietary negotiation method that is built into the MagSafe technology. Effectively, there is a chip inside the MacBook that communicates with a chip inside the power adapter using that center data pin that was mentioned above. The communication is non-standard from what I’ve read, and is used to determine how much power the laptop is capable of receiving safely at any given moment. If you have a MacBook, you can observe this when plugging in the MagSafe charger (v1, v2 or v3) and noticing how the amber light does not illuminate immediately when attaching the connector. The negotiation takes place to determine the available charge level, temperature of the battery, capacity of the battery, and also takes other factors into effect such as low power mode. This ultimately gives the power adapter the “green light” to pump however much power the laptop is asking for, at which point the connector will illuminate orange. Once the battery has reached a full charge, the laptop communicates with the power adapter to stop sending power, which also illuminates the light green. There is also some useful info on how MagSafe works here, where it was attempted to bring MagSafe to a Mac Mini with a DIY project but ultimately failed due to the technical complexity of this negotiation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQWGFKhBQwU
Hope this helps!
Ever changed a worn cable on a MagSafe 1 PSU? The Cable only has 2 wires in it. There is no communication in there except to turn the led different colors.
That’s intriguing @blkhawk, so presumably a MagSafe 1 expansion card could be possible, or at least easier than MagSafe 2.
With help of expansion slots and hot swap touch pad it would be possible to add a piano keyboard, a drum machine, synthesizer. If you are someone who takes notes alot (in class etc) you can throw away touchpad and replace with small screen and stylus. Gamers could possibly attach a joystick or something. It’s just amazing
The idea would be the following: in the old time’s laptop had a dock feature, that would be able to add a series of extensions to the computer. What would be to have a full size bottom part that can connect directly to the Framework laptop? Imagine that instead of custom cutouts on the main chassis, we could have a full size playground with only a powered usb hub inside. Would it be easier to create this?
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is easily doable (hell, maybe even planned) with the FW16
There used to be an old laptop that had this. And integrated mouse that you could pop out and use, the pop it back into the laptop case when not needed.
It might be kinda neat to have a expansion module that did something similar. When not used, the mouse is tucked away as an expansion module. Click a button and it pops out and little mouse (likely shaped like the expansion module housing ) and wired into the expansion module connector. When ya are done, just click it back into place
Bonus if you can do something like this in collab with swiftpoint
It certainly would be a fun expansion card to have. Though given the small size I’m not sure how many would use it much. So Framework might not want to invest in stocking it. Feels like more of a community expansion card.
I hadn’t heard of these small swiftpoint mice before. Interesting for travel use.
I had to look up the fcc internal pics of a couple models https://fccid.io/X8Y600/Internal-Photos/Internal-Photos-4109666
https://fccid.io/X8Y300/Internal-Photos/Internal-Photos-1310660
One uses a Nordic nRF51822 Bluetooth LE and 2.4 GHz SoC. Looks like there is some open source keyboard projects that can use the nRF51822. I know ZMK can use the nRF52840. Not sure if that is similar enough that it would translate over to support for this chip. But ZMK does have mousekey support as work-in-progress.
For a wired mouse, which it seems you were suggesting, QMK has full mouse support. Though there is a limited number of optical mouse sensors that have available drivers. I converted my Steel Series 15 button mouse over to QMK and I love it. There are a couple QMK forks that supports the nrf52 series BT chips. BlueMicro is one.
