In case you haven’t seen it, Framework has posted a video showing which parts from the 13 Pro are compatible with the old 13s, and one thing that really surprised me was the touchscreen.
Even more surprising is that the touchscreen doesn’t have an additional cable for the digitizer like most other panels. Instead, it has just one connector!
Does anyone know how this works? Is there some firmware magic to side-channel USB via the eDP connector?
The mainboard side connector allways had the usb and i2c connections for touchscreens they were just previously not used.
As @Adrian_Joachim says, Framework was forward-thinking & included both i2c and usb pins on their mainboard display connector so that they could support any kind of touchscreen someday in the future. And that day is now!
Why no separate cable for touch?
Framework said that the screen is custom-made for them, so the touch pins will just be part of the single cable.
Speaking of planning for potential future options,
the Framework 16 also has both i2c and usb pins on it’s mainboard display connector. The Framework 12 has backlight pins on it’s keyboard connector, and usb pins near it’s power button (to have the option to add a fingerprint reader perhaps).
That is indeed very forward-thinking, thank you for the info. I looked around a bit and it seems the pinout of eDP is barely standardized at all, there have even been different connectors over the years, only the protocol itself is standardized.
On the display side it almost is (the vast majority of display use one of 3 de-facto standards). On the device side however it is wild-wild west.