I hope they’re not in the process of copying your idea
Honestly I don’t think I see much of a point for them, since the Framework market is, honestly, fairly small. It’s not like an RPi form factor device, or a more generic USB dongle thing. This is basically a custom micro USB hub we’re talking here. The only thing special about it is it’s using a pretty new 3.2g2 hub chip and it’s exceptionally tiny, and might actually support some pretty decent charging speeds for the laptop.
I can’t really see much other use case for something like this as a more general product outside of the Framework ecosystem. Can you?
I suspect it’s more the relatively low volume and it took “too long and too many resources”, and so now they won’t make enough and so they’re ditching him/us. I’m more inclined to thing that, sadly. Although I think it’s large enough potential market if it goes up on the FW marketplace, and FW puts it on the order customization page. But first it has to get made and perhaps a FW blog post/email and get the word out to those that don’t frequent the forums.
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The license says the card design can be used even commercially. I personally can imagine multitudes of use cases for the expansion cards, for example RPi5 case that holds up the PCIe on it to a switch and have 4-6 expansion card slots. Another if it fits into a 5.25 inch standard slot, it’s a pc PCIe device, and you could put 4-8 cards into the CD drive slot. A router device you could put, again 4-8 cards, choosing type c, type a, or ethernet connection, so the router could become a simple NAS, a router, a slim client, KVM if anyone makes an HDMI recording card and a USB output card. The market could be WAY bigger.
To yeah, they could just sell the chip,and not worry about developing a while device. But they may be in talks with someone actually developing the card who promises bigger purchase numbers than Josh and asks to not sell the chip to him. I’m not saying it is what’s happening, just that it could, tho it still sounds paranoid 
the best would be of FW just licensed Josh’s design and paid royalties to him after each sold. Passive income is best for studies too, not needing to think about it
After trying a few other contact methods I’ve finally got everything I need to design the Expansion Card, I’m going to try to fast-track this project, but I do not have an ETA right now.
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Do what you can, not going to expect miracles if you’re hostage to another company feeling like getting around to it.
And above all, don’t completely stress yourself out, lose sleep over it, or not have some sort of a life because of the delay.
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No pressure but i’m probably going to need to change my delivery address if the card isn’t delivered by august 20th as I’ll be leaveing for college soon after that.
Send me an email at josh_cook@i2clabs.com.au with your new address and I’ll make a note on your order.
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Update emails are going out now. nothing much to update other than what I’ve said in the past couple days.
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Very much appreciated!
Wonderful! We love it when we see this!
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Any update? Has the project been stalled/blocked by something, or is it just taking some time to complete? No rush, I just wanted to know if it is still on its way or not.
Litherally read the 10 replys above you…
Do you mean the ones from a month ago where he said he didn’t have an ETA??? It doesn’t seem inappropriate to ask for another update. I’m historically not the best with social rules/cues so you can correct me if I’m being rude by asking, but it seems acceptable to me given that it has been a month and the last update is that he has all the parts and is fast-tracking the project.
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Another update, I haven’t had much time, but I’m halfway done designing my evaluation board (won’t be in expansion card format) to test out a couple of major things. But one major thing that has come up is, the PD input is limited to 28V, due to heat dissipation, while this is annoying, you’d be making the enclosure hit very high temps, which is mainly caused by how the chip is powered from the system. Once I get the eval board done, I can mostly copy the schematic over, and just have to redo PCB design + layout, still not sure of an ETA.
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Might be a dumb question, but is the PD input limitation a fixable issue (even if the fix is to use a metal enclosure with thermal pads!)? Was planning on using this card for my FW16, so the 28V (140w) max kinda blocks that idea as the 16 really needs 36V (180w) or above.
I use a 100 W Anker USB PD wall wart … as long as I am not gaming, just surfing … It is fine … I do believe the whole point of this project, while it would be nice to have higher PD, is to have multiple USB-Cs one card … anything else is a luxury … imo
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Is this limitation something that could be lifted on your own risk? Could it be implemented in a way like CPU clock speed, it would throttle down if it’s overheating?
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Seems like a fair tradeoff to me. Looking forward to when the final design is done. Better to keep people from getting burned, also for a FW 13 this still allows 100W charging, which is plenty.
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