Hi Framework Community,
As our semester wraps up, we have an update for our I2C expansion card! For those of you who missed our introduction post, we’re a team of students at Michigan Technological University working in the Open Source Hardware Enterprise (OSHE). We are currently developing both an I2C expansion card and a front display for the desktop (learn more about that here).
Our goal for the I2C expansion card this semester was to create a fully functioning card that fits within the specifications of the Framework expansion card system. Throughout the design process, we ran into a few challenges — one of the main ones being whether to include both male and female pin headers on the same board. Doing so would have required the card to extend outside of the laptop’s form factor, which we wanted to avoid.
In the end, we decided to create two separate PCB designs: one featuring female headers and one featuring male headers. This approach keeps both versions compact and fully compatible with the Framework’s expansion bay system.
If you’d like to learn more or follow our progress, you can find our GitHub here. As always, OSHE is committed to keeping all of our projects open source and accessible for everyone.
We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future iterations — community input helps us make these designs even better!
