An enclosed expansion card (no external port) that can be easily opened with a female USB port inside would be nice for small wireless mouse dongles that will always be plugged in.
That way you can leave the dongle plugged in all the time but won’t have it sticking out at all. To me, that would be an improvement functionally and aesthetically, and the signal loss from having to go through a layer of plastic shouldn’t matter with how close the mouse/keyboard likely will be.
some of the options in the survey is just … weird.
LED matrix? like a flash light?
I would go further and say that if we do release a LED matrix, we should also do a Infrared matrix. although nobody use infrared anymore.
Also. I noticed this thing from the picture:
There seem to also be a plastic cable connector on that PCB’s bottom side, which adds to the intrigue.
Perhaps this is some sort of pre-release test modules
They have mentioned about a microprocessor in a module with pins on the outside for the i/o
I suspect that is one of those.
it do look a lot like a microprocessor in a module with pins on the outside.
They sound like “Arduino Micro in a shell” type, which is very curious on exactly what they are trying to do, since the Micro is capable of many things (e.g. native USB connection, SPI, I2C, ADC and DAC)
If they wanted a Arduino-Micro-in-a-shell, they shouldn’t bother and instead just provide USB-C to micro USB cables. In fact, they don’t even need to do that because we have USB-A connector expansion cards.
Well there are a few of us that have an actual use case for a microprocessor in a module, and also are working on it. In fact I already have one running prototype.
I noticed. In this thread, this is shown:
Which is really intriguing. Perhaps as things like USB chip programmers and the sort.
The amount of difficulty I have in swapping out the expansion cards convinces me more every day that a Kensington lock card would be very effective.
If someone saw an opportunistic thief struggling to press the release button for 30 seconds to disconnect the laptop from the lock, it’d probably stand out 
There’s a thread around here somewhere addressing the first. Nirav mentions that they found it takes about 10 insertions/removals for things to become easier and more consistent.
Regarding the second, the K-slot on the laptops I fix are usually reinforced with a metal plate and a relatively hefty screw. I don’t think it’d fit in a module, and doesn’t seem like it would protect the laptop much if it did.
(Imagining a poor little expansion card dangling at the end of a security cable…)
Anyway, the plastic probably would snap/break and probably bend with aluminum. It may be possible to have a singular slot that is high security, whether that be a locking mechanism that requires a magnet to release out of the slot, which would require a small amount of steel above the security slot.
I love this idea. I came to suggest laptop attached input devices in general. I’d personally love an attached numpad or trackball too. someone suggested a side wheel too.
The monoprice SD card reader is 34mm L x 40mm W. It also looks like it’d be slightly longer and wider than an expansion card with the case stripped away. Seems like a promising footprint though 
I ordered two of the monoprice adapters to try just now. I get my laptop tomorrow. I’ll try em out when I get em in a week.
I’m excited about the prospect of a microcontroller card, it would aid in the development of physical hardware especially with UAVs. The ability to directly interface with i2c, pwm, and uart components would be invaluable.
Yes, but the problem is that each IDE (or design suite) have its own proprietary thing and you will be hard-pressed making something for all of them or for none of them.
It’s probably a bit niche, and given the vendor probably impossible but… I have a Logitech G935 headset, that I use with my PC. There is a minimally functional open source configuration program to get things like the sidetone/loopback set up on linux but not much more than that. The dongle is a USB-A thing, of course.
IF (and it’s a big if) a dongle for this kind of headset could be made, especially if it could spoof the pairing that goes on in the background for it, that would be great. It’d be a big project because I’m sure Logitech would be no help at all, but it would be pretty great. Well beyond my skill level, though. I should probably just buy a bluetooth headset lol
I see that it kind of went into direction of whatever expansion card you can think of, so I will add my weird niche suggestion: a vacuum tube tester.
I’m throwing my hat in the ring for some kind of capture card, as had been mentioned previously, with the primary use case of bringing up things like Raspberry Pis in the lab where displays are hard to come by. Often it would be great to just be able to plug the display output of a Pi into my laptop and work through things that way. (I realize this is what ssh is for, but when you’re deploying a lot of Pis on an enterprise network, it’s a pain to find the MAC address for each one without a display)
These are a little crazy when a $20-50 USB-A or USB-C dongle can do the job.
@Ethan_Spoelstra Is that capability limited to the GPD? Would you be able to do the same thing right now with the Framework?
