Niche expansion cards

You can do most of the these with the Snack expansion already developed.

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Just thought, as I have not seen this mentioned yet, a GPS expansion card? I have seen some pretty small gps receivers, and obviously they can fit them into smartphones…

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GPS/tracking expansion card

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Camera. I doubt it would get much interest, but I just had the idea of a camera module, so the camera is facing down towards the table. When you want to take a picture, you’d prop the laptop partially opened like a tent as a tripod.

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Wackiest thing I could think of that hasn’t been mentioned would be a pull-out phone stand with wireless charging, or better yet a USB-C male. Have phone easily in view and charging while working. Bonus if the expansion took USB-C DP alt mode in to make the frame.work become a secondary display for the phone, either automatically in full screen or use the phone’s display output in a user interactive window. Think a phone generated “Dex” desktop as a virtualbox like window inside your main Linux or Winblows OS. Could be scrcpy, but true dp alt mode is needed to trigger desktop mode on some phones. Handle word processing on main OS and switch to typing out a quick text on the phone without hands coming off the keyboard, that’s the end goal…

Ahem:

Just sayin’ :wink:

Speed reading fail for me. Lol.

You get credit for that part then. Rest of the ideas are my credit / fault :slight_smile:

This may sound very odd but, I would be interested in seeing a 34pin floppy interface that would be compatible with things like omnidisk, spinrite, and 5.25 disks (not available in usb floppies)

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  • Mini SD card slot (mini, not micro)(yes it’s basically a retired format)
  • I would say ports for specific kinds of video game controllers, but I can’t think of any that are small enough… EDIT: Maybe the Sega Saturn? Basically resembles an HDMI port.
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I don’t see how that could possibly fit. You’re probably better off with an adapter board of some sort that interfaces via plain old USB.

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It could use some kind of more compact interface with an adapter cable that turns it into 34 pin. Considering 7 of the 34 pin floppy port’s pins are ground and 3 are no used, it may be possible to reduce the pin count on laptop side by 3-9 pins. I think the hardest part would be implementing the hardware itself, since floppy controls are only designed for the ISA and LPC bus.

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A retractable cable? How about a male USB-C cable (in the card) that can be plugged in to the power brick?

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additional Speakers?

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I would like to have an NFC or RFID Add In Card or it could be build in to the laptop directly.

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Search for it… It’s already a discussion point.

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Hmm.
the cards slots do provide some openings so you can run a pad and some tubes to watercool the laptop.
I do not think it’s technically a mod as a 3D printed case for a housing is all what’s really needed. The “water cooling” can be as simple as a small copper pipe soldered onto the existing heatsink.

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A medium-strong LED torch with its own button.

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A powerbank for other devices. It would charge in the laptop and could then be used on the go for a phone.

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What about a hardware random number generator that uses atmospheric microscopic phenomena like light, sound, temperature for entropy… Not sure the security implications of doing this through usbc but could be cool.

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