Idea! - Narrow Expansion Card Slots

Creators & Developers Expansion Card
1

Hi All!

Relatively new framework owner and so far loving the product - had an idea I wanted to share:

TLDR:
Idea - two half width expansion cards in place of one of the full width slot (FW13)

Requires - mainboards to have additional USB C header (hence 5 total, not sure if feasible) & new design of bottom cover to transform 1 of the full width slots to 2 half width slots w/rails, etc

Benefit - users must have 1x USB C for charging, so in real terms, have 3 slots to use (which is relatively few), this idea accepts that one narrow slot will be used for a USB C card and gives users the remaining 4 slots (3 wide, 1 narrow) to customise, all of which would have full* speed USB C connections

Drawbacks - not backwards compatible; narrow slot can only be USB C / other expansion with narrow port with small control electronics

(*as full as each mainboard allows ref intel/amd FW13)

More info -

One thing that quickly sprung to mind using the FW13 was that we’re effectively bound to mounting at least one expansion card slot for USB C in order to charge the laptop.
Whereas I agree with other forum posts that it’s best not to have a permanent USB C slot in the laptop body to avoid scrapping a motherboard due to port damage, perhaps there’s another alternative.
Initially the idea of a dual USB C port or combo C/A (that others have suggested and would be great as it’d be plug and play!) seemed good, the above idea to divide the current ~30mm slot into two narrower 15mm slots seems like it could yield greater flexibility/customizability for users if it were technically feasible to have 5 USB C headers from the main board.

Candidates for half sized ports could be (depending on size of control electronics):
USB C
Micro SD
3.5mm Jack
USB A appears infeasible (just), maybe with just a bit of extra width it could work.

Not a computer designer so have no idea how many IO ports can be pulled from a mainboard, just noted that a lot of other products in this segment have a greater number of ports.

Thanks for reading, look forward to hearing from you all and contributing to the community!

2

This doesn’t really make sense, the CPUs don’t really have that many USB-C (or even Thunderbolt) ports. The Framework 16 already uses a buildin USB controller (or hub, not sure) to control the two front ports, which is why these have pretty limited functionality.

The other problem is the electronic inside the expansion cards. Apart from the plain USB-C and A ports, most of the mare already quite “full”, e. g. the ethernet card even protrudes a lot (not only because of the ethernet plug, there’s also simply not enough room for the electronics inside the standard form factor).

Also how much expansion cards do you really need?