Do you mean an expansion card or expansion bay? The expansion bay is only found on the Framework 16, and it’s located at the back, optionally housing the dGPU.
If you mean an expansion card, trouble is, a standard smart card is larger than the size of an expansion card. Though some community members have proposed an expansion card that extends slightly under the laptop in order to have a smart card side in just under the laptop.
While they would fit into an Expansion Card, there are two spots of bother:
The NVMe’s are fixed with a screw, the same way as the internal ones.
As I doubt the NVMe connector is actually designed to provide hot-swap capabilities, this could be actually a good thing, as it prevents the NVMe’s from getting damaged from said action.
The adapters include heat pads to transfer the heat to their metal casings… and when in use they get hot to the point where it’s unbearable to touch them. Of course, this varies by the actual NVMe you are using and its use case, but their threshold usually being at 70°C, you need to think about how to transfer said heat to avoid throttling.
Considering these issues, you are way better off using USB-C NVMe enclosures including passive (or even active) heat dissipation.
I have both the PC Card MoGo mouse as well as it’s X54 ExpressCard MoGo mouse sibling. They both use a small arm on the bottom which flips down to offer some height. The FrameWork Expansion MoGo could similarly flip open to offer some height for better grip.
Those dual ports work using DP++ also know as DisplayPort Dual Mode. That is unfortunately not supported when using USB C DP Alt Mode ( DisplayPort - Wikipedia ), probably because the DisplayPort chip in the laptop can’t detect if a HDMI or DisplayPort cable has been plugged in.
Otherwise it would have been the perfect extension card.
Don’t a lot of smart cards also do nfc?
Maybe an expansion card that does nfc would work?
One place I worked used it. It could detect any card within about 1 meter. So you just put the smart card on a lanyard round your neck. It automatically invoked a screen lock if you walked away out of range.
I’d love a charge input only USB-C expansion card.
Sometimes my powerbank charges the laptop. Sometimes the laptop charges the powerbank. I never want the latter behavior. I can’t figure out how to force the issue from the commandline, but is there a way to do it in hardware? Maybe poison the PD negotiation or something, so this one specific port always acts as a power input. Maybe it requires the expansion card to actually have two PD chips and negotiate separately with the powerbank and the laptop, then connect them. Idk, but there must be a way.
If that could be baked into an expansion card, I’d buy (or build) one immediately. Bonus points if it’s yellow which my reflexes already associate as the color of charge input jacks…
Do you remember the pointing device on the Blackberry Bold? Some versions had a tiny trackball, and some versions had an optical sensor, basically an optical mouse flipped upside-down so you’d slide your finger over it, and it would track the motion of your fingerprint features just the way an optical mouse would track the motion of the desk underneath.
This allows a gizmo about 12x12mm to act as a full mouse. That plus a BLE radio and battery should fit into an expansion card form factor no problem. See here:
I looked into USB-IF PD spec awhile ago to better understand how negotiation is done and roles are chosen. I came away disappointed, as it’s less intelligent than one might hope.
First, regarding controlling which device receives vs provides charge, I didn’t see any mention even suggesting that control of that be exposed to the user. And without standards being set by the USB-IF on how to expose control, I think it’s unlikely to be a feature we’ll see made available at the OS level. I really hope that they created a standard and I just missed it, or that they have plans to.
Of course, they talk about how devices advertise their capabilities, negotiate, and are expected to behave. For the case of devices capable of both receiving and providing charge, known as DRP (Dual-Role Power), they are able to declare a preference. E.g. DRP, prefer to receive charge. But if two DRP devices are connected that either have the same preference or perhaps don’t declare a preference, well, they say the two devices will literally choose at random which one receives power. This is what it says they are supposed to do.
TL;DR - if you connect your power bank and laptop, and you find that it’s random if the power bank provides charge or instead receives charge, well, unplug them and try again to get the direction you want. It seems that it’s literally supposed to be random.
You should be able to do it, if you can insert yourself in between the PD negotiation. But I don’t know if there is any open and easy library for doing PD DRP or PD Source negotiation yourself in a microcontroller, or if there’s a PD DRP or PD Source controller chip which offers easy dynamic control and passes enough information out to a microcontroller so that you could use it to build a Man-in-the-Middle device.
I know of a couple open libraries for either acting as a PD Sink (request charge), or for controlling a dedicated PD Sink controller chip. Such as this, github.com/CentyLab/AP33772S-Cpp. Just don’t know of one for PD DRP or PD Source.
I had a hunt through this thread, this forum, and broadly online and could not find anything about a mini displayport (mDP) expansion card being worked on by anyone. The closest I found was its last place finish in a 2021 poll about which expansion cards people wanted to see. Am I missing something out there? Is there a better place to express this wish?
I think one small dual UCB-c/USB-a expansion for the PD100W and 2.0 Dongle for the mouse+external keyboard. This will allow me to use Laptop to work in every place I need to. I need to use double screen thus external keyboard and mouse is a must. Having 2 ports in one expansion would make my life easier.
it would be great if you guys made an expansion card that uses USB4 PCI-e Tunneling to connect to PCI-e to SATA controllers so you could have a card with 5 or even 10 SATA ports.
This would be perfect to turn an old Framework mainboard into a really good NAS.
Details, details, some people are SO negitive agreed, 3 USB type c ports might be a tight squeeze - but a USB c with an audio jack would be nice - simply put, just fit in more ‘stuff’ where it can fit…
ESP32
Today I’ve got my framework laptop and I’m thinking about Arduino microcontroller in expansion card. Sorry if there’s a similar thread. I was looking for it but I haven’t found any.
Just for playing with it when I’m traveling. Or a as an interface to different busses like SPI, I2C or Dallas onewire.
Benefits:
there’s a great codebase
hundreds of compatible hardware
with small battery it could be used for offline data recording
IO can be realized as tiny wagos.
I’d love to see people make some Expansion cards with MCUs like that. Namely, extremely popular ones that can be very inexpensive, depending on the board you get.