Niche expansion cards

Creators & Developers Expansion Card
246

To add to that: they suck up to 25 W, which is the equivalent of a second CPU worth of power consumption. Heat dissipation is going to be the primary concern though assuming the power problem is moot (i.e., the laptop will be plugged in).

Some U.2 drives (e.g, Micron 7100) require just 9 W average and can be configured with a power draw cap (e.g., 4 W for a Micron 7100). For comparison, M.2 drives are typically capped at 11.5 W and typically draw far less peak power. It’s interesting to note that Sabrent’s blog post addressing the power draw limits of M.2 notes that in a future spec, M.2 may get its power draw limit lifted to 30 W for the sake of power-hungry PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

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@Josh_Cook
What do you think ?

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If you are planning for a large enough volume to do custom tooling, your product will have copyright issues with Apple.

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@Josh_Cook Yes I might if I’m selling them right ? But if I don’t, how can I have copyright issues only by creating a 3D design of it?

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You’ve got a couple issues at hand: patent and trademark:

Unless permitted by the patent owner, one commits patent infringement by making, using, offering to sell, or selling something that contains every element of a patented claim or its equivalent while the patent is in effect. source

Apple’s patent status on MagSafe 3 is not immediately clear, but it’s almost certain that at least some part of it is covered by one of their patents.

The second issue will be one of Trademark infringement. Apple owns the trademark to “MagSafe”, so using that that term to refer to a product, even a free one that you are not selling, would be trademark infringement.

I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. I highly recommend you get advice from a lawyer before continuing to avoid running afoul of Apple’s big team of lawyers.

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small laser distance measuring device.
all kind of sensor, like temperature, humidity, air pressure

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How about smart home hubs like Zigbee, ZWave, etc?

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Small RISC-V cpu Expansion Card

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@0xN1C0 US9991657B2 - Magnetic adapter - Google Patents might cover something like this; it’s a patent from apple for a magsafe female to usb-c male adapter

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USB Killer Expansion

It kills the laptop when plugged in.
That is all

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I don’t have very weird ones, but a few I might use/make myself

  • An expansion bay with a Wemos D1 mini inside. I develop a lot for wemos D1 mostly wifi (MQTT, HTTPS, web-pages, ntfy messaging) and I have a board hanging from the USB port, so it would be nice to put in a bay for development. Wifi antenna could still be decent if the casing is plastic. GPIO pins can be covered, never use it during development.
  • VGA for the poor folks that have no HDMI monitor
  • Full size SD card (this is serious, I need it for camera/3D printer)
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Framework is working on a full size SD card reader. They have announced it a few weeks ago in a blog post and the development will be documented in a series of YouTube videos.

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Christian_Kaser

4h

Framework is working on a full size SD card reader. They have announced it a few weeks ago in a blog post and the development will be documented in a series of YouTube videos.
[/quote]

There have been a couple of projects in this community to fit an available full SD reader into an expansion card. A quick search should fine them. I think they are what spurred FW to investigate doing their own one seeing that these could fit the connector.

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I pickup up one of these on eBay. It was supposed to be a 4.5mm one, but it is actually a 7.4mm one. Yet to try it out. Have investigated disassembling it, but it seems to be well glued up.

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You can pick similar/opposite converters, way smaller too, for different brands from third parties. I have one for an old HP laptop I own that chargers only with barrel and now I can charge with a generic 65W usbc charger.

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How about a chopstick holder card? I can image a mechanism simular to extensible cup holders in cars. You push onto it and it unfolds two donuts.
Why you might ask? Well I really like eating asian takeout foods while working and this would make it more practical.

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Blockquote
How about a chopstick holder card? I can image a mechanism simular to extensible cup holders in cars. You push onto it and it unfolds two donuts.
Why you might ask? Well I really like eating asian takeout foods while working and this would make it more practical.

@_Lennart_Schuster
Maybe ask @XenoCow
This could be a simple adaption of the existing snack drawer:

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Blockquote jontor24

(Niche expansion cards - #25 by jontor24)

I thought the module could plug into the laptop and then get wider to receive a CAC/smart card.

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I gave this some thought and have a couple ideas. The best of the two requires an addition to the drawer that has been suggested and I would like to implement when I get the motivation to.

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@Neil_Fox

I guess should be possible to use multiple usb extension cards as a mouse for haptics and function. When used with a cable there could be a sdcard(micro?) slot inside the mouse and even a usb c passthrough would be nice! I have an idea how the cable and button mousepart should split horizontally so the upper part stays in the slot and gives good relive to the connector and the cable kinda folds out. I dont know how to put the cable back inside… :wink: