After the announcement of the Laptop 12 I was wondering if it would be possible to create a tablet chassis a la surface for the internals similar to what has been done with the 13 mainboard?
Do you think such a chassis could be a possible future product or community project?
You mean a tablet case without the hinge and keyboard for the Framework 12 mainboard and screen? I think that should be easily possible with some 3d printing. A minor problem could be the positioning of the fingerprint reader/power button and that the screen would need to be mounted upside down.
it is totally doable, but would be a little thick
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maybe the power button/fingerprint reader could be mounted on the back?
the thickness would be really tricky because according to my measurements, its probably 4-5 mm thick, and the motherboard (with a sodimm slot would probably be 5-8mm thick, so it would probably end up being something close to 12-16mm thick assuming the back case is made of 1mm thick aluminum
I’m actually not sure where the power button normally is on the Framework 12. It doesn’t really seem visible on the product photos.
The custom tablet would definitely be relatively thick. I assume you’d probably want to reuse the normal back plate of the mainboard for cooling and screw holes and stuff and probably just add a little bit of interfacing plastic to mount the screen front directly to the bottom and fill the hinge slots and so on.
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The power button seems to be on the right side in front of the expansion cards.
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WAIT I KNOW THIS ONE
the power button is on the side so it shouldnt be a problem. If I were designing a tablet with this and it had the expansion card functionality there would be no space advantage to keeping the backplate, but if not it would be integrated into the chassis so I could make it a little thinner
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