Hi, will the motherboard schematics be published shortly?
The only competitor to the Framework laptop that I know of, which is called the MNT Reform, has already published their schematics here: https://mntre.com/reform2/handbook/_static/schem/reform2-motherboardx.pdf
If nothing else, the schematics would be educational.
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Framework has said the schematics will be made available to repair shops and I guess they will need an NDA signed because not all of it belongs to Framework.
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Yup, they confirmed they went over this with Louis Rossmann, that there would be NDAs involved but I appreciate that it is possible.
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Do we know if any framework user can request the forms to get the schematics, or is that available only to repair shops?
@Manuel Just curious what would be need of the schematics when most of the user-thing is very well documented. Board should be pretty labelled as well (for most of the common things), in case of water damage or something serious it’s better to talk to a repair shop nearby…
If you are learning electricals they should be able to provide you I’d guess with the NDA agreement. Without NDA most probably other brands may copy the idea, while still having other revenue sources with older designs… It’d not be good for such a startup at this stage atleast in my opinion.
Currently the full schematic set is only available to repair shops (including independent repair shops) who get in Framework hardware. We like to share as much as we can, but we are currently not able to share that information publicly or to individuals.
We do have open schematics and documentation for Expansion Cards though if you are interested in tinkering with it: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards
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@nrp That’s unfortunate but understandable, thanks for the response!
@Animesh_Sahu Mostly I was just looking into modding options, and was curious to see the if the keyboard and touchpad connectors are openly documented.
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Is the motherboard at least made in Taiwan and not farmed out to the mainland? This is important for the avoidance of spy chips. Without schematics it’s impossible to say whether any particular chip (including a chip disguised as a resistor or capacitor) shouldn’t be on the board.
One might recall that Bloomberg did a couple stories on spy chips found on Supermicro boards, which were not retracted despite pressure. And then of course there’s the case of Lenovo putting spy chips in laptops that were sold to the US military, which is why I’m going to buy a Thinkpad anytime soon.
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@nrp when you mention schematics being available to independent repair shops, would this also happen to include board views?
It includes component placement drawings. The CAD we have isn’t supported by existing board view tools like OpenBoardView.
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