I had a thought that I wanted to take a super-thin low-powered device that interfaces with USB and put it in as a part of a modded Framework 16’s trackpad module, but I don’t want to do anything to the mainboard to do this. So, my thinking was that if the keyboard modules use USB, I should be able to grab one of the unused set of pins and run some thin wires or a ribbon cable to the trackpad module to run my device.
As far as I know, for this to work in theory, the pins on the keyboard interfaces need to be independent USB interfaces (i.e. there isn’t some weird thing where a bunch of the sets of pins are actually the same electrically). Is that the case? And is there anything else I would need to worry about other than using an appropriate interface?
To clarify, there is USB space for a total of 5 simultaneous USB devices if we could wire the excess modules to useful items, right? One will pretty much always be a keyboard, but others could be in the lower sections connected by ribbon cables.
Because if it is meant to only run like 2 or 3 devices, it might make sense from a design perspective to not provide too much power.
If we do have all that power, I have ideas…
I’m imagining a modded trackpad module with 4 inch x slightly-less-than 3 inch screenless drawing tablet on the right wrist rest and maybe a low power wireless phone charger on the left (useful in a pinch if forget or need to use your power cable and honestly I can’t think of anything else to put there). And maybe a hidden USB port somewhere inside the computer to contain my mouse tranceiver too so that it won’t break.
O.5 amps is the amount they say is available as far as I can tell, so I wouldn’t be expecting too much out of each of the trackpad module devices. But I don’t think they make wireless chargers small enough for 2.5 watts that a phone can use. But maybe if you could tap multiple USB ports you could get 1.5 amps, or 7.5 W, which does exist on the lower end. It wouldn’t be particularly useful for charging your phone, but you could use it if you needed your phone and forgot your cable. Personally, my phone doesn’t even have wireless charging, so that’s not a mod I would do. Maybe an NFC chip reader instead, they draw less than 0.2 A at 5 V and they can be very convenient for security applications like logins or encryption.
What concerns me is that while each port might be able to draw 0.5 amps, the hub as a whole might be limited to something like 1.5 amps because it was never intended to have more than three 0.5 amp draws on it simultaneously.
I just think that this is, as far as I can tell, essentially untapped modularity potential either way, because if you don’t opt for the LED matrices, you have at 0.5 A of USB potential to use on some other component, which I bet would be enough for a lot of USB devices.