Finally, I can show an ambitious Expansion Card of mine, that I’ve already been using personally. It’s the USB-A card on steroids - designed to be compatible with it, but it can do so much more!
For a start, there’s an internal USB-A socket for your mouse receiver - you don’t even have to take it apart or solder onto the board, a receiver can plug right in and you can unplug it whenever you want. There’s also a USB-C pulldown switch - you can power the card off whenever you need, using i.e. the Framework screwdriver spudger side. And, it doesn’t extend beyond the feet in the Z direction. That’s not all, however!
There’s also a grid of pins that you can use for addons. I’ve made three addons - MicroSD reader, USB-C 2.0 host port, and USB-UART + EC debug cards, which plug onto the pins and extend from beyond the laptop. They can be used as standalone cards if you solder a USB-C plug on, too! Furthermore, it’s easy to design your own addons - the expansion are on 2.54mm grid, so you can just use a protoboard and add your own stuff. The addon cards are designed to lighten up my collection of dongles, so they’re more temporary additions you can plug in and out whenever you need one and avoid taking up a whole USB-C port. I will take pictures of these when I get home - forgot.
Oh, and this board is made to fit inside the stock USB-A Expansion shell, which it barely doesn’t - but it does fit if you trim the board a little bit; next PCB version will fix this. So, if you solder a mouse receiver to this card instead of the internal USB-A socket, you can also use it this card as the PCB for the stock USB-A card + mouse receiver inside!
At the moment, I don’t have a 3D printed shell design - yet ^^ I will put up a bounty on these forums in an hour or two - whoever designs a shell from the 3D printed files I’ll provide, will get this card and a full set of addons! If nobody can do that within a week, I’ll do it myself, just need to get to my Solidworks PC. When I have the shell, I’ll add it to the store - in the meantime, I’ll ship this card with extra threaded inserts so that you can get a shell printed on your own, and, personally, I run it shell-less at the moment - it is pretty sturdy on its own!
It’s a seriously featureful Expansion Card - I talk more about its capabilities in the Tindie listing, there’s a few more things I’ve managed to cram into it ^~^ Will open-source the design within a day, too, just need to clean up the repositories!
