I chimed in on FW’s discord hoping to get the attention of someone from FW.
Thanks. As I can’t find any official contact to Framework team, apart from their support team which doesn’t care about my messages - my only options now that I can think of are to contact LTT and/or Rossmann, because they should have some means to reach someone at FW.
Although this is totally not what I expected in such what appears to be open company.
Ok I hope I’m not making a complete fool out of myself now, but I have another update.
I was just playing around with these faulty USB-C cards in my hands and just for fun I connected one to another. I discovered that they are slightly bent, as if USB-C connector was angled a little bit.
I fixed the angle and now the electrical short disappeared.
@Adrian_Joachim you were probably right that this is a mechanical failure. Although I NEVER subjected these expansion cards to any excessive force like pulling my laptop with cable attached.
I believe that the major force they were subjected to is just sitting around with USB-C cable attached under it’s own weight for extended period of time.
Update update: brand new card after a few hours of use has the same 0 Ohm short. After flexing the female USB-C connector a little - the short is gone.
Swapping back to old “fried”, “fixed” card to see if it works now…
Another update: flexing the USB on the other boards didn’t fix the short. What really fixed it is blowing air over both sides of PCB. The shorts are gone now.
As a disclaimer I can tell that both the USB sockets and PCBs look pristine clear to me, like out of the factory.
My USB-C socket in the phone is embarassing in comparison.
Congrats on your new findings. It seems like your case has been internally escalated, but FW team is very busy right now from what I heard, so could be a bit of wait, watch out for any replies they might send you.
When I first opened up a FW Type-C card, I was quite curiously why the PCB isn’t just outright passthrough, but I also realize I don’t have high level electrical engineering knowledge so I didn’t gave too much thoughts. Now looking at your photo with component spots on the board populated, it is quite interesting! (the one I look apart seems to have identical PCB, but wasn’t populated by any components)
Yeah I would not trust that to stay like that for long, very likely the solder joints are cracked or straight up broken at this point.
At least you did not mangle the port on the mainboard, that would be even dumber. Getting the cards to take one for the team is a nice feature. Now someone make a card with thinkpad style armored type-c ports XD.