I’ve been working on this idea for a little while now (basically all conceptual at the moment until I have time to properly design the pcb and whatnot) but basically having a network switch built into the back of the laptop.
At the moment I have settled on having a 2.5gb internal nic for connecting directly to the laptop as well as 1x 2.5gb uplink port and 4x 1gb ports on the exterior of the device. Originally I wanted all 2.5gb but due to the availability of various chips it is just not possible for an individual to develop something at those speeds.
The issue I am trying to solve at the moment is the case for this module. I would love to be able to reuse the expansion bay cover module as its a fairly complicated part and most people will already have one plus it already comes with fans. The problem with the expansion bay cover is that its cutout for custom I/O is too small for rj45 ports which is inconvenient. I thought of creating a daughter board that is purely to house the external rj45 ports as well as a pair of USB C connectors to connect to the main control board through the opening in the expansion bay cover. My biggest concern with this is that there would be too much interference with multiple ethernet connections going through a USB C connector and having 5 individual USB C connectors doesn’t seem great. I talked on the framework discord about this some and josh cook thought it might work to just replace the plastic part of the expansion bay cover with an altered 3d printable one but it seems like quite an involved process to disassemble the cover module and I don’t have a 3d printer large enough to print that part. If anyone has any other ideas/potential solutions to this please let me know.
I have the necessary components picked out, I just haven’t created a PCB design yet. Hopefully, I can get a working board soonish, but I can make no timeline promises as I am in my senior year of high school and so I am kinda busy with life stuff at the moment.
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For all it’s worth, I would buy something like this. I’m commenting to keep track of this project and where it ends up going.
Update:
I have been working on this off and on for the last couple of weeks when I have time, far from finished but I do have several updates.
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Making RJ45 fit:
After some research I found another framework thread seeking to make a low profile Ethernet adapter, there I saw that they used an interesting partial rj45 port that has the pins but not most of the physical connector. In theory this connector should just be slim enough to fit through the opening in the rear, and then I will design a 3d printable piece that will form the top half of all the connectors as well as making it look a bit nicer.
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Schematic:
I have gotten a lot of the schematic fleshed out, just some odds and ends with power and flash chips. However, the current version of frameworks expansion bay documentation isn’t finalized, so to ensure compatibility I will be waiting to make a functional prototype until that is ready.
Also just to show something for what I’ve done, here is a (and I can’t stress this enough) very very early rendering of the board. Things likely to change in it? Basically everything, this was more for me to figure out placement of the connectors and for instance that notch between the rj45 connectors will likely go away partially.
If you want to keep more up to date with the project, I am fairly active in the #projects channel in the official framework discord server.
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I’d thought similar something like this for what other modules might come about aside from a GPU to make use of that expansion 8x bus, but aside from hosting a lan party or some mobile surveillance network, not sure how useful this would be vs a mobile router (as a network engineer speaking).
I was more hoping for something spicy with higher rates like an intel e810 or mellanox chip for sfp/qsfp28. Years ago I built some mobile rigs for an isp customer of mine out of a shuttle mini-pc I could shove 10/40gbe intel 710 or mellanox x5 cards into for 10/25/40/100gbe ports for testing with iperf and trex. This would be a perfect replacement as a travel testing packet blaster for engineers on the go, certainly more cost-effective than an ixia or sprient.
Biggest reason it’s as limited as it is has to do with what a consumer can buy off the shelf. I can’t say for certain about either of those that I couldn’t get one but in general I can’t just buy the chip for one of those nics (I’m assuming based on the manufacturers being mellanox and intel) because they just don’t sell those to anyone. But I did try to find the fastest one I could actually buy from an electronics distributor.
One of my main goals was to make this fit within the existing framework expansion bay blank, which I still believe is possible but for something beefier might not be as possible. I was originally gonna have sfp+ to do 10gb but I couldn’t find a switch mc capable of that available and upon closer analysis of the framework expansion bay cover, fitting an sfp cage without modification would be nearly impossible. So for the first version I’m gonna stick to the 2.5gb nic and uplink with four 1gb ports just cause it’s much simpler.
If I can muster the motivation, finals are in two weeks and after that my schedule is pretty open for a little over a month, so I might try and get something that I could potentially get a sample made of. No guarantees tho. Glad to see others interested tho.
I know there’s been a lot more oem aliexpress special boxes with sfp+ on them lately, even an occasional 25gbe sfp28 port, so I have to imagine someone’s got a line on a reference-architecture chip that can do 10/25gbe meant for oem motherboard vendors to build off, and these are usually some sort of intel chip.
I’ve not looked at the complexity of the board of a 710/810 chip, but might be worth a reball of their chip to make portable to another platform if not, assuming I were an enterprising sort, and they’re cheap enough on ebay now as donor boards. I’ve seen reference oem vendors making intel chip nics, so someone has a recipe for them, whether legit or just reverse engineering.
Yes, harder than I’m thinking I’m sure, but who doesn’t like a challenge. I’ve watched youtube repairs reball nvidia gpu’s all day, why not. 
My other thought was I have a small-ish Qnap QNA-T310G1S TB adapter that uses the an Aquantia/Marvell chip with a thunderbolt bridge, and these are common for any 10g/mgig nic these days that might work, at least for 10g. These might be an easier chip to start with at least that they’re at least built for portable design vs a full pcie slot + heatsink and active cooling.
Anyway, I applaud the network focus as a network person myself.
